Ghost Consultant
by William Easley
Summary: An old acquaintance of Dipper, who knows about his expertise with ghosts, gets in touch regarding a problem she has: her high school just may be haunted. Oh, and another problem: she's just lost her boyfriend . . . .
1. Chapter 1

_Note: I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them._

* * *

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 1: Where the Deer and the Phantasms Roam**

**(September 24, 2016)**

Winnemunka, MN, 7:00 a.m.—That Saturday, Eloise Niedermeyer, seventeen, woke up in the front upstairs bedroom of the house she and her parents shared. It was an old-style house, once a farmhouse, now stripped of its acreage and alone on its own rather small lot.

Without turning on the light, she got out of bed, raised the shade, and gazed out the window. It was a view she had seen every morning since she was about four. Talk about exciting? Well, you weren't talking about that view, then.

Sun was peeking above the horizon. The cornstalks in the big field across the highway were yellowing under a blue sky. Looked like a sunny day. It had been warm lately, and she expected the high might reach the low seventies.

No traffic on the highway, but then it was early on a weekend day. Par for the course, in other words.

In the early sunlight, the trees on the far edge of the cornfield glowed in reds and oranges and yellows, the colors of fall. A skein of geese vee'd over the field, maybe heading south for the winter. On the ground, movement caught her eye, and she carefully knelt by the window, elbow crooked on the sill, chin resting on her hand. What was that out in the cornstalks? Oh.

Two tawny deer, a large one and a smaller one, doe and a growing fawn, came browsing along the strip of grass between the highway and the cornfield. "Don't get run over," Elloise advised them, but softly, not wanting to startle the beautiful animals. On a fall day the previous year the school bus had to swing around a dead deer, lying in a bloody scatter of glinting green headlight glass to show how it had died, and she'd seen it, and—it ruined her whole day. Her stomach crawled just from remembering it.

But this morning, anyway, Mom and Baby Deer were going to be OK. After about a minute, the doe's ears pricked up, and she turned and hurried away down a cornrow, her offspring following. After a moment, she ran, with that rocking-horse grace of a deer in flight, and so did her child, and Eloise watched the white flags of their tails vanish.

She heard a car start up, and knew that was what had disturbed the deer: her dad had opened the garage door and now was off somewhere. Oh, right. He had a consultation somewhere about a hundred miles off. She watched his black BMW turn left and head off toward someplace west.

Her mom hated that he worked on so many Saturdays, but, hey, Ernst Niedermeyer was a bank auditor, and like a hired gun in the Old West, he roamed the prairies rounding up bad nombres, pardner. And sometimes that meant explaining to a branch bank manager exactly why his or her numbers had not added up. He liked to do that face to face, with a briefcase full of documents at his side. Yay, Dad.

God, she felt so bored. Bored and lonely. Bored and lonely and puzzled by the stuff going on at school. Bored and lonely and puzzled and—let's tell the truth here, Eloise—itchy for a boyfriend. A good boyfriend, not a total shit like Jason.

_I ought to call Dipper Pines,_ Eloise thought. _It could be a ghost._

She had faced down one ghost before, in their own basement—not that it was a terrible battle or anything, she had simply performed an exorcism ritual that had let the poor thing go on to her reward.

She had looked so peaceful and happy just before she vanished. And now Eloise was sure—well, pretty sure—that she was on the trail of another haunting spirit. She'd read up on them, and she'd even explored the Westminster Mansion when her folks had gone out to California on a vacation.

The rambling old house with its bizarre architecture was rumored to be haunted, and she and Dipper Pines, whom she'd met standing on line waiting for admission to the mansion, had confirmed that he rumors were true.

Boy, were they true. It had been a close call.

However, she knew that Dipper had a lot of experience as a ghost-hunter. And one of his uncles was a paranormalist, he'd told her. And maybe he could advise her. And anyway, she liked talking to him.

"I totally need a boyfriend," she told the window.

_Not too good in the romance department, our Eloise_, she thought. Damn Jason, anyway. She'd given him one final chance about two times too many. And speaking about two-timing, Jason, you slug, hope you're happy with Cinthia. Cinthia wasn't even very pretty, but . . . she had a reputation around the school.

Oh, yeah, Jason was probably really enjoying Cynthia. As often as possible.

Eloise softly told the window, "And he'll get tired of her in about a month and he'll call me, and it'll be all 'Hey, Ellie, I'm real sorry we had our misunderstanding, I can't stop thinking about you, girl.' Yeah, right. Forget you."

Trouble was, she went to a small rural high school, just 88 seniors, counting her, and everybody had pretty much paired off already. Maybe college would be better, she thought.

She had to get her applications sent in very soon now. Where did Dipper say he was going? Western someplace. Maybe she could even apply there. But no, Dipper had a girlfriend already. Then again, maybe he had some sav California guy friends and he could introduce her to them. Anyway, it would be fun to just hang around with him again. . . .

The floor started to get really hard under her knees, so she climbed back in bed and pulled the covers over herself. She could hear her mother downstairs and knew that in a minute she'd call up the stairs: "Breakfast!"

"Don't even think about boys," Eloise told herself sternly. "Back off, hormones."

Think about something else. The ghost. If it was a ghost. She'd think about that instead. Something was loose in the school, that was for sure.

Principal Kamfer thought it was a vandal, or maybe more than one. He had even had motion-detector security cameras installed. They didn't show anything, except the results.

In the middle of the night, locked lockers opened. The padlocks unshackled and fell off the doors. The doors banged open and shut, a whole row of them at a time. The tropical fish tank in the anteroom to the principal's office boiled, killing all the colorful occupants. The girls' toilets on the first floor overflowed, making a horrible mess that for a week forced the girls to use the girls' room upstairs, leading to overcrowding and potty emergencies.

Just little stuff like that, all recorded without a ghost in sight.

Principal Kamfer looked at the hallway video and said, "They strung monofilament fishing line to make the lockers do that." The goldfish tank, well, "Faulty wiring in the tank heater. Just overheated, that's all." The eruption of the girls' toilets? "Sewer backups happen now and again."

Or, Eloise thought, they just might have themselves a nasty, hateful ghost.

The big catch: Nobody had died in the school, at least not in living memory.

The school had stood there since the 1960s. She could find no record anywhere of a tragedy. Surely the local paper would have reported it if a student had committed suicide because her so-called boyfriend had taken up with some little wh—_no, don't think of Jason_.

Anyway, even if some unlucky kid had perished of terminal boredom in the middle of Mrs. Allagan's Civics class, well, surely that would have made the news. _Local Sophomore Succumbs in Class. Civics Teacher Boasts, "I knew I could do it!"_

Hadn't happened, though, and Eloise knew because she had scanned all the back issues of the local paper's online archive, doing a text search for every single mention of East Chestnut County High from 1966, when the school opened, up to 2006, the last year that articles had been archived.

School sports, school graduations, school schedules, school open houses, but no school ghosts. And if anybody had died at school in the last ten years,_ somebody_ would have remembered. They still talked about the time some guy had cut his thumb off in shop class, and that was more than ten years ago.

In the newspaper archive, the only pairing of the words _death _and _East Chestnut High_ was in 1989, when Mr. Warren Kellock, the first principal and by then long retired, had quietly passed away at the age of 81. _Murder, suicide, _and similar words didn't even show up in any local stories. Winnemunka was a peaceful town.

What _was_ going on at the school, then? A random wandering haunt? A temp?

Dipper would know.

Eloise looked at her clock: 7:22. What time would it be in Piedmont, California? Let's see . . . 5:22. Probably too early to call. She reached for her phone, on the docking station, and texted him instead:

_Dipper, pls call me 2day when you get this. Ghost business maybe. Love, Eloise_.

"Eloise! Breakfast!"

She yelled, "Coming, Mom!" Hesitated, thumbs poised, about to back up and erase "Love."

Oh, what the hell. It wasn't like they were going to jump in bed together, was it? He was a thousand miles away. Though, remembering the photos he had sent, the way he looked now, he might turn out to be quite a snack . . . oh hell.

Without erasing the word, she pressed _send._


	2. Chapter 2

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 2: The Call**

**(September 24, 2016)**

"What's up, Broseph?" Mabel asked as she, coming down the stairs, met Dipper, coming up.

"Nothing, just have to do some stuff," he said, dodging Tripper, who always liked to greet people with a doggy dance, whether he was on the stairs or on level ground.

Mabel reached down and hooked her finger in the dog's collar to let Dipper past. "OK, don't tell me, then. But me, I'm gonna let Tripper out and then have breakfast and—"

"Fine, fine," Dipper said.

"—and then go down the street and do some stuff with Billy," she finished. "We made a date to do something, but we didn't decide what. Maybe go to the park and let him play on the playground."

Dipper hadn't paused until she said that. At the top of the stair, he froze with his hand on the rail. "Uh—Mabel, we need to talk about Billy," he said. "Only—not right now, OK?"

She looked up from the bottom of the stairs. She was wearing one of her sweaters, a morning-sky blue one with a golden smiling sun appliqué. Tripper, eager to get out into the backyard, danced around her feet and whined. Mabel frowned at Dipper. "What? Why? What aren't you telling me? Is he in trouble?"

"Not exactly," Dipper said. "Look, wait until we have time to go into it." _Dang it, Mabel, can't you notice how the kid looks at you? He's head over heels in puppy love!_

Mabel shrugged and gave into Tripper's urging, going with him out of sight, down the hall toward the back door.

Dipper hesitated at the top of the stairs. _She'll have to do something about this. Billy's just at that age when he starts to notice girls as girls. She'll have to let him down gently somehow._

However, that called for delicate handling. Dipper remembered all too well how at twelve, he'd fallen so hard for Wendy and how she had gently rejected his romantic interest but had wanted to stay friends . . . and how the way that all finally worked out was a one-in-a-million chance.

He couldn't see that happening now. For one thing, Billy was nowhere near as mature for his age as Dipper had been (Dipper assured himself). And since he happened to be a human incarnation of an eldritch horror without even knowing that, it was important to manage things so he didn't get all resentful and angry—the way Li'l Gideon had been.

_Maybe I can get Wendy to have a talk with her._

Dipper went back to his bedroom and—very unusually for him—locked the door. He glanced out the back window and saw Mabel scooping up what Tripper had just deposited on the lawn—Dad had come home with a device that let you put the baggie on a kind of plastic claw. The claw was on the end of a barrel that had a trigger and handle on the other end. It not only retrieved the mess, but sealed it in the baggie, so you didn't have to touch anything, really. Mabel liked it so much that she kept cheerleading for Tripper to poop, even when the dog obviously was not in the mood.

Now down in the back yard, she put the baggie in another bag and then found Tripper's favorite ball and started to play fetch with him. The brown dog went bounding joyously in pursuit of the high-bouncing prey

OK, Mabel was going to be busy for a while with Tripper and with breakfast and then with Billy. Mom and Dad had spoken of no errands for Dipper to run. He lay back on his bed and punched in Eloise's number. It was a little past eight here, so it would be a little past ten in Minnesota—

"Hi, Dipper!"

He couldn't help smiling at her warm tone. "Hi, Eloise. Uh, I got your text. What's the trouble?"

"Whoa," she said, laughing. "Let's catch up a little first. How's school?"

He shrugged, though they weren't face-timing and she couldn't see that. "Uh, you know. Harder classes, but I can handle them. Oh, this year I'm captain of the Varsity track team—"

Her voice rose in what sounded like pleased surprise: "No kidding? That's awesome!"

Flustered, Dipper said, "Well, you know, it's extra work and all. But it's, yeah, it kinda made me feel good. We, you know, we have some good people on the team this year. Anyhow, how are things with you? School OK?"

"Mostly," she said. "But that's why I called you. You're the only person in the world I can say this to straight out: I think there's probably a ghost loose in the school. Oh, wait, before we start on all that, let me get a pen and paper . . . OK, I forgot the name of the college you said you'd already been accepted for."

"Uh, it's Western Alliance University," Dipper said, surprised. "Its mailing address is Crescent City, but it's really a little east of there. Pretty area, Nearly rural. And it's just three miles from Olmsted, which is where Mabel's going to get her art degree."

"Crescent City," Eloise said. "California, right?"

Oh, right, a girl from Minnesota wouldn't know that. Dipper replied, "Yeah, but it's way up north from here. California's kind of a long state, you know. Piedmont's about in the middle—well, you know, because you've been to San Jose, and that's not far from us. But Western Alliance is, I guess, like 350 miles north of us? Something like that, anyhow. Close to the Oregon border. Uh, why?"

"I'm getting my college applications out," Eloise said in a way that Dipper thought was a shade too casual. "I thought I might try one or two schools in California. I'm pretty tired of Minnesota winters. What are you majoring in?"

Dipper laughed. "For a change, that's something I haven't fully planned out. I know whatever my degree will be, there'll be an emphasis in the sciences, but I want to minor in video production and photography. That's why I chose Western. See, it was originally CCC State, but it merged with two other colleges back in the 1980s, so it's a university now and since it's kind of a conglomeration of three different colleges, it has a huge range of majors to choose from. It has a good reputation and some really prestigious teachers—I'm not trying to sell you on it, though."

Eloise laughed. "The really important question now. How close to the beach is it?"

Dipper blinked. "Um, I really don't know. Few miles, I guess. I have to tell you, though, that far north, the ocean stays pretty cold! Like fifty degrees for most of the year."

"That doesn't matter," she said. "I just loved seeing the Pacific. Anyway. Let me tell you about the stuff that's happening in our school."

She talked at some length, the story taking about forty minutes. Dipper put her on speaker and sat at his desk making notes. "Has it hurt anybody?" he asked.

"No, but it only shows up at night. So far, anyway. Mr. Kamfer thinks that most of the stuff that's happened is just accidental, like the girls' room deal, and the really weird stuff, like the lockers being opened—that was on the security video I told you about—he says is caused by a gang of vandals."

Dipper rapidly clicked his pen. "Mm. Have you seen the video?"

"No, but Mrs. Patel—she's a math teacher who loves to get off the topic—saw it and described it to my class. She doesn't think anybody could do all that stuff with fishing line or anything."

"OK," Dipper said, nervously continuing his pen-clicking. "From what you've told me, assuming it_ is _some kind of ghost, it's definitely malicious. A lot of this sounds like high-level poltergeist activity. Have there been any manifestations?"

"That's . . . kind of weird," Eloise said. "Nothing shows up on the videos, but people around school are talking about what a football player claims he saw. This happened just last week, Tuesday I think."

"Tell me about it," Dipper said, his pen poised.

* * *

As Eloise said, it wasn't all that much of a story, really. Cutting it to the bone, football season had begun, and on Tuesday afternoon the team had been out on the field practicing after school. For one reason or another, they finished very late, around seven p.m., as the sun was setting. And then one guy, Tanner Berlinger, remembered he'd left his math book in his locker and needed it because homework was due. He asked the coach to let him go in and get it, so the coach had unlocked the school's back door.

Tanner went in and a few minutes later came running out without his textbook and scared to death. The coach walked back in with him, he got the book, and he ran back out again. The coach turned out the lights and locked the outer door. He hadn't seen a thing.

But Tanner . . .

He told some of the guys (they laughed at him) and then he told his girlfriend, Janna, and she told Eloise and some other girls.

Tanner said he had to walk down the hall, past the cafeteria, and then turn left down a long hall leading past the library, to get to his locker. Coach had turned on the overhead lights in both hallways, but he waited at the outside door.

Tanner had got to the lunchroom door when the lights on that hall all went out. After a few seconds, they came back on. They were fluorescents, and they flickered. Tanner thought Coach was messing with him.

He'd stopped when the lights went out—the hall wasn't totally dark, but it was hard to see without the lights on—and when he got to the spot where the rows of lockers began, he saw someone standing in the hall ahead.

"He thinks it was a girl," Janna had said in a whisper. "She was wearing some old-fashioned clothes and had long straight black hair that hung down over her eyes, and she was standing with her arms dangling and her head down, like she was looking at the ground."

Then the lights flickered off and on again. And the girl was gone.

Tanner started to get scared, but he was close to his locker.

He fumbled the dial a couple of times—new locks this year, he was having trouble remembering the combination—but finally got it right, opened the locker, and started to reach for the math book.

The lights went out, and he froze. They stayed out for ten, fifteen seconds. Then they came back on.

Tanner closed the locker door to look back the way he had come to see if the cross hall lights down past the lunchroom were still on.

And there she stood, her face ten inches away from his.

And the lights went out.

* * *

"They came on again," Eloise told Dipper, "and she wasn't there, but Tanner was so scared he peed his pants. He went running out, and Coach stopped him and wanted to know where his book was, and Tanner was, I guess, babbling.

Coach grabbed his arm and marched him back into the school and up to his locker—door was still hanging open—and he got the book and Coach made Tanner close and lock the locker again and they went out. Tanner was wearing black jeans and they didn't show the wet, but the coach noticed some dribbles and thought the sprinkler system pipe might be leaking. Tanner didn't tell him the truth. Anyway, they got out and nothing else happened."

Dipper was pen-clicking again as he thought."Did Tanner tell any of the teachers?"

"I don't think so," Eloise said. "Next day he told some of the guys on the team and they made fun of him. But Janna says he's really scared."

"What did he say the figure looked like?"

"That's the strange thing," Eloise said. "He told Janna that he couldn't even describe how horrible it was up close, looking through its hanging hair at him and grinning. There was something real wrong with those eyes staring through the hair, he said. It wasn't human, he said. Not like a live human, anyhow."

"He's still scared?"

"Oh, yeah—he emptied out his locker and now he's carrying a backpack around with everything in it, all his books and stuff. He says he'll never use that locker again."

"Wow," Dipper said. "The apparition must have been pretty bad."

"Wait, I haven't told you the rest of it," Eloise said. She paused for some time. "Janna made the three girls she told this to swear not to tell anybody else, but you're a special case, OK?"

"I don't even know any of them," Dipper pointed out. "And I'm trying to help you get to the bottom of this, so yeah. You can tell me."

He heard her take a deep breath. "Tanner found something inside his math book that night when he started doing his homework. It was a folded piece of just regular old notebook paper. He knew he hadn't put it in there. When he unfolded it, he read a note that he told Janna he was pretty sure was written in dried blood. He let her look at it, and she says it made her feel horrible. Like somebody walking over her grave, she told me."

Dipper felt a prickling on the back of his neck. "What did it say?"

Eloise said, "Rusty-red ink, looking crusted. No punctuation. All caps. It read, _I'll come for you my love_."


	3. Chapter 3

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 3: Ford Advises**

**(September 23, 2016)**

Dipper had the obsessive-compulsive drive to deal with things the moment they came up, and that is why he always finished his homework in the early evening after he returned from school or track practice.

Mabel often warned him, "That stifles inspiration. Brobro. Let the time pressure build up until it squeezes your best work out of you like toothpaste from a stomped tube! Ha, that was fun."

And Dipper had to admit that, in her case at least, Mabel had a point. She was great for last-minute, frantic cramming sessions, but she was also bright enough to make them pay off.

Once when they had the same psychology class and had weekly multiple-choice exams, Dipper studied diligently, while Mabel goofed off most of the time, up until the mornings of the tests—and yet they both always scored A's on the exams, and generally were within three points of each other. What amazed Dipper was that sometimes Mabel was on the high side—her 96 to Dipper's 94.

"How do you even do that?" he had once asked her, less in irritation than from curiosity. "You hardly crack the book!"

She'd shrugged. "Meh, if you pay attention, the key is to look at all five answers quickly. Four of them will be stupid. One will be slightly less stupid than the others, and that's always the right answer."

Try as he might, Dipper couldn't see that, though Mabel attempted to explain it with an example that Dipper had missed but she had aced. Really, how would it work with an item like this?

* * *

_12\. Walter, who is twelve years old, saw across the street an old woman lying on the sidewalk. His impulse was to help her, but then he saw three different adults walk right around her and he decided she did not need help and went on his way. Which of these terms does Walter's action illustrate?_

_A. Attribution error B. Desensitization C. Overexposure D. Bystander effect E. Social indifference effect_

* * *

Mabel got that one right—"D." Dipper had gone for "B."

"How'd you know?" Dipper had asked when they got their papers back.

"It's obvious!" Mabel said. "Three of these are phrases, not single words, right? The teacher realized that if there was only one phrase, it would stick out and be obvious and tossed in more phrases to distract us. So it's either A, D, or E. Can't be A, because there's nothing to attribute, right? Can't be E, because it has three words, not just two, and that means it's too obvious. So what's left is D, and anyway, I remembered the teacher mentioned that once in class. Ba-boom."

OK, whatever. Anyway, this is all to say that by ten o'clock every Friday night, all Dipper's homework was done, while Mabel's was always waiting for eight o'clock Sunday night for her to begin it.

Which meant that his whole weekend was clear for researching Eloise's problem. By five Saturday afternoon, he'd gone through his books and the Internet searching for information (and incidentally finding a fascinating and sort of revolting wealth of information on Japanese ghosts). He made notes—pages of them—and then word-processed and stored them in a folder marked "MN GHOST."

By then he'd already decided that he needed professional help. But Mom called him down to dinner.

* * *

Out in Winnemunka, the Niederlanders had already eaten dinner. Eloise was up in her room, a ponderous, musty-smelling book open on her knees as she sat propped up in bed. She'd checked the book out from the library—it irked her that every time she asked to borrow Mom's car, a sensible Ronda hatchback, Mom put her through an interrogation, and it irked her even more that when she came back, lugging the book, and returned the car keys, Mom had said, "Oh, you really did go to the library!"

As if Eloise routinely lied to her! Instead of only occasionally when it was really necessary.

Anyway, the book she consulted was _A Cyclopaedia of Apparitions, Ghosts, Hauntings, and Psychic Projections, _and it had been published in Boston under the auspices of the S.P.R. in 1925. The editor was someone named Edmund Massey Wedgwood, F.R.S.

Something else that irked Eloise was that when she was reading a paper book, she couldn't do a quick Goggle search of what stuff like SPR and FRS meant.

The book included a thirty-page article on Poltergeists. Since Dipper had mentioned them, and she had heard of them but didn't really know much about them, she read with interest.

Wedgwood said, "the phenomena commonly subsumed in the category of 'poltergeist' may more properly be designated as intermittently occurring supra-normal events with effects upon the material world."

OK.

But the author described some of these effects, and though Wedgwood did not categorize them under headings (Dipper had said this might be a high-level poltergeist), she thought she could make out some broad general subcategories.

First, some poltergeist activity resulted in noticeable but not disturbing effects: a breeze springing up in a closed, well-sealed room, for example, strong enough to blow papers off a desk or riffle the pages of a calendar hung on the wall. Or sounds—footsteps coming up an empty staircase. Things like that.

Wedgwood gave a few examples, and while (or as he would have written, whilst) discussing audible footsteps, he said parenthetically, "and here we may discern the origin of the term, for _poltergeist _(first attested in 1838) is a German compound word meaning 'noisy ghost.' In the northern part of Britain, the term _boggart _approximates the phenomenon."

In her notebook, Eloise wrote "Level 1—harmless. Sounds, wind, etc."

Escalating the action, sometimes poltergeists would cause disturbances—not harmful, exactly, more annoying. "In one case in Edinburgh, a church librarian reported that at irregular intervals something would cause the books on one particular shelf to fall from the shelf to the floor. He witnessed the phenomenon himself, and in his description he explains that they did not all fall at once, but 'slipped, one at a time, to the edge of the shelf and toppled to the floor.'"

He had to wait for the entire shelf to be emptied, and then when he replaced the books in their proper location, they would not fall again; however, "if he tried to replace them whilst the disturbance was in progress, they would obstinately move off the shelf once more." A more common phenomenon had pebbles striking the roof of a house, causing no damage beyond noise.

Eloise scribbled "Level 2-noise, things fall, pebbles, no damage"

However, some poltergeists went beyond childish mischief and became destructive. In the second decade of the 18th century, Epworth Rectory was haunted by a poltergeist the family called "Jeffrey." It produced horrendous, thundering noises, like someone leaping, on the ceilings of the family's bedrooms. It produced a sound of trumpets, waking them from sleep and keeping them nervous and exhausted. It set small fires, fortunately when the family was present and observed the flames spontaneously breaking out in time to extinguish them.

A century later, in "the American state of Tennessee," the Bell Witch not only made horrific noises—it sounded sometimes as if invisible dogs were having a ferocious fight in the bedrooms as people tried to sleep—but it pulled the children's hair and pinched the adults, invisibly. It shattered windows and hurled pictures from walls, breaking the frames.

Nodding, Eloise wrote "Level 3—damages things, hurts people."

And the next level—well, that one sounded threatening. Wedgwood said that such cases were, thankfully, rare. But he gave three examples: In one, an invisible_ something_ cursed in a grating, low, inhuman voice while scratching a victim with invisible claws that felt long, sharp, and hooked. "Mr. Pellew," the author wrote, "one Sabbath, upon retuning from church, was set upon by the poltergeist as soon as he stepped over the threshold of his own home. To his wife's horror, his coat and shirt were shredded and ripped, and deep wounds opened upon his breast. She and their daughter dragged Mr. Pellew out of the house, though something seemed to hold onto him and resist. His wounds, though not life-threatening, were painful and serious."

Wedgwood wrote, "The doctors described them as not dissimilar to those inflicted by a large lion—they raked across the man's flesh, five wounds in an eight-inch spread, deep enough to expose the ribs and cause serious bleeding." Though the poltergeist had a voice, it would not respond to questions, but merely cursed horribly.

Another outbreak of poltergeist activity took place in a Yorkshire boys' school in the late 1800s. It began with insane laughter that seemed to come from an attic that, when examined, proved vacant.

Then the headmaster's flock of chickens was killed by something—something that beheaded the birds but did not eat them. Puzzlingly, though there were a dozen hens and a rooster, none of them raised any alarm that night. A voice came through the fireplace, swearing vengeance against a teacher—who no longer was at the school, having died years earlier.

And finally, over three days, three boys died, one after the other: One was found at the base of the main building's north wall, as if he had jumped from a window on the top story of the house. Except that side of the house had no windows, and there was no access to the roof. Another was found suffocated, with his sheet wound around his head so tightly that he died of asphyxiation. And the third—his body was found in a second-story classroom, kneeling by a window.

His head lay outside in the garden, twenty-five feet below the window.

And the window itself was nailed shut with old, rusted nails, and had not been opened in fifty years. The glass was unbroken. But the poltergeist had somehow guillotined the victim.

"The school," Wedgwood noted, "closed permanently in November 1888, following these tragedies. The owner had it torn down, stone by stone. The land where it stood is still barren."

Swallowing hard, Eloise wrote "Level 4—very dangerous. Serious harm. May kill."

And even though the book's style was dry and clinical, she couldn't stop reading.

The more she read, the more Eloise began to wonder if maybe she should just bug her parents until they sent her to a private school.

"I wish Dipper was here," she muttered, uncomfortably aware that her dreams that night would be far from pleasant.

* * *

Dipper was far away, of course, in Piedmont. To be precise, he was exactly 1603.7 miles away, if one could fly in a Great Circle arc from Eloise's house to his. That evening after dinner, he went back to his room, called Grunkle Ford and asked if he was busy—Ford was not, he said—and talked him through the process of setting up his laptop in his study and connecting through Yipe! so the two of them could confer.

"OK," Dipper said, "you remember the trouble I had at the Westminster House that time, and you investigated it later?"

"Quite vividly," Ford said, smiling.

"I think I told you that I met a girl as I was going in, and she and I hung out for the tour. Well, her name's Eloise Niedermeyer, and she lives in Minnesota, and she thinks there's a ghost in her high school. I've been researching all day, and I think she's right."

"What are the particulars?" Ford asked.

"I've organized my notes, typed up a document, and I've emailed it to you," Dipper said. "Will you have time to review it this weekend and then chat with me about it?"

"I should think so," Ford said. "How long is the document?"

"Um, in word processing, five pages and one short paragraph. Single-spaced. I'd guess about 2000 words."

He saw Ford chuckle at his precision. "I shall unload it from my electronic mail and read it immediately. I'll call you back."

And half an hour later he did. Amazingly for his lack of jargon, Ford had learned to do tasks like downloading from email, though he still didn't quite know what to call them. "Mason, this is both interesting and alarming. The apparition has shown up recently?"

He hadn't asked Eloise about the dates. "Since school started. In Minnesota they start in late August, so . . . about a month?"

"Hmm. And the witness claimed the figure seemed to wear old-fashioned clothing. Any details on that?"

"Sorry, no, Eloise didn't get to ask the boy who saw it."

Ford rubbed his chin as he read the print-out of Dipper's notes. "Female, hair half-hiding its face, eyes somehow wrong. Suggestive. The activity—the physical disturbances, killing the tropical fish, creating a mess in the restroom, slamming lockers and doors randomly at night, interfering with the lights—those are at least Grade Four poltergeist activity. Yet poltergeists are rarely linked with a visible apparition. I wonder . . . can you get in touch with Eloise tonight?"

Dipper looked at the time on his computer screen. "It would be about ten-forty there," he said. "I doubt she'd be asleep, so I could call."

"Get a pen," his great-uncle said. "I want you to ask her three questions and take careful note of the answers."

Dipper pulled a pad toward himself and held his pen at the ready. "Go ahead."

Ford said, "First: What stood on the site of the school in former times, before the building was erected?"

"Got that," Dipper said. "You think maybe a Native American burial site?"

"Who can say? It sounds almost too cliché, doesn't it? But if she knows or can find out, that might be a clue. Now, second question: Have any physical changes been made either to the school building or to the grounds recently?"

"Mm," Dipper said, writing. "Maybe a buried body was disturbed if a foundation was dug or something."

"My thinking precisely," Ford said. "That would make it a ghost rather than a poltergeist. Now, last question: Has anyone tried remaining inside the school overnight? If so, what happened?"

"Pretty sure her answer will be no," Dipper said. "But I'll ask her."

Ford set the printout aside. "As to exorcising this thing—that's not a job I'd gladly hand to an ordinary high-school student."

Dipper smiled. "Eloise isn't exactly ordinary. She took the ghosts in the Westminster case right in stride, and her own house was haunted by either a Native American woman or a pioneer woman. She was able to release it so it could go on."

"Impressive," Ford said. "However, in this case she will definitely need some help. I'm tied down by the Institute for the time being, so I couldn't' work in the time to travel out there until sometime late next month. If the matter seems urgent enough—I can't believe I'm asking this, but it shows you how much confidence I have in you—would you be able to make a quick trip to Minnesota and back? I can arrange transportation."

"Um, that would be really hard," Dipper said. "You mean like fly out, do the exorcism, and come right back home again?"

Ford nodded. "Yes, exactly that. If you could leave on a Friday afternoon, I'm reasonably sure you could return by Sunday. I'd call in the Agency, but believe me, the school and the community in Minnesota would be much the better if it could be handled quietly."

Dipper looked at his calendar. "Well," he said, "the first Monday in October is a teacher's work day. That evening they're starting rehearsals for the senior play, but I'm not auditioning for it, and there won't be a track practice. So, yeah, I guess I could fly out on the evening of the thirtieth and stay until October 3 if I had to. But Mom and Dad would never agree to that."

"Well, Mason," Ford said, his voice low and conspiratorial, "Alex and Wanda don't exactly know everything about you, do they? For a couple of years, they had no idea how close you and Wendy were, for example."

"Lie to them?" Dipper asked.

"Not necessarily. Misdirect them, rather. I'll come up with a cover story, and we'll keep it a secret between ourselves. Mind, I won't send you at all if it seems there's real danger. But if it's something that an exorcism can resolve, I trust you absolutely."

"You and Grunkle Stan are really alike in some ways," Dipper said. "And I guess I'm like the both of you. OK. I'm in. I'll call Eloise back right now."

* * *

A moment later, 1603.7 miles away, Eloise's phone rang on the nightstand right beside her head. She had fallen asleep over the Wedgwood book, reading a horrific story about a girl who had been tormented by a vicious, invisible assailant that—the book only hinted—had not only ripped her skin but had violated her.

The phone rang.

And Eloise woke with a scream.


	4. Chapter 4

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 4: Paranormal Panic**

**(September 26, 2016)**

* * *

"_Ya know, kids, though lyin' is wrong, there's times when it's not only OK, it's moral. Ya can always lie when it's for the comn good."—Grunkle Stan_

"_Wait, what? Grunkle Stan, did you say, 'Common good' or "Conman's good?'"—Dipper_

"_There's a difference?"—Grunkle Stan_

"_Yay! We got a license to lie!"—Mabel_

* * *

That little exchange took place the summer Mabel and Dipper were twelve—it happened not long after the zombie invasion ruined Mabel's karaoke party and while Grunkle Stan, Soos, and the kids were waiting for the insurance adjuster to visit the Mystery Shack—and it kept running through Dipper's head.

Thing was, he had a real difficulty with lying, especially to his parents. He could hardly do it, couldn't do it well, and they could always detect the falsehoods.

Oh, keeping his and Wendy's secret had been easy for him, but when he thought about it, that wasn't so much active lying. It was just not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

However, to be fair, keeping the secret was easy because they never came right out and asked him, "Hey, Dipper, just out of curiosity are you planning to marry an older lumberjack girl the very day you turn eighteen?"

See? Easy. He was bad at lying, but exceptionally good at rationalizing.

Mabel, on the other hand, didn't regard telling her parents bare-faced whoppers as lying, exactly. It was more—"Like what you do when you write your books, Dipdop—taking a dull, ordinary story like the Gobblewonker and spicing it up with imaginary details."

"No, I just changed names to protect people's privacy. And, OK, maybe I fictionalized a little," Dipper told her as she drove them to school on Monday.

Mabel's sarcasm oozed through, and she did her little vocal impression of Old Man McGucket: "Yeah, yeah, I was _there_, Brobro, and I know you didn't jump on top of no lake monster with no harpoon to stabbify it! I would've remembered."

In _It Lurked in the Lake,_ that was how Tripper Palms, the fictional version of Dipper, had discovered the monster was made of metal. "That . . . wasn't lying, though," Dipper said. "It was just, you know, more interesting than what really—"

"Spicing it up, yeah," Mabel said, stopping at a crossing guard's hand signal. "Now, tell me about why you're gonna sneak off to a rendezvous with the other woman this weekend if you can?"

"I told you," Dipper said. "Grunkle Ford thinks someone who knows about getting rid of ghosts needs to travel out there and do an exorcism. And Eloise is _not_ the other woman! She's just a random friend I met—"

"Thanks, cutie!" Mabel called out as she drove past the crossing guard, who grinned and saluted. Then she pulled into the Seniors' parking lot. "Dipper, that was amazing! You used the words 'friend' and 'I' in the same sentence!"

"Come on," he pleaded. "OK, I'll admit, I don't make friends very easily—"

"Or at all."

"—but Eloise and I went through this scary time together in the Westminster house. We kind of, you know, helped each other through that."

Mabel parked and switched off the engine. "Yeah, yeah, but tell me the absolute truth now, or I swear I'll spill everything to Mom, and you know she'll ground you."

"Mabel! I thought you'd help—"

"Then answer one question, boy detective! Here it is. Don't lie to me. If Eloise wants to get real friendly and kiss and hug and snuggle and . . . get more friendly than that, even, like do the horizontal tango, will you refuse her?"

"Of course I would!" Dipper exploded. It took a lot to make him angry, but now he bit back some bitter words. "Mabel, come _on_! Wendy and I are _engaged_! First of all, if anything like that happened, yes, I'd say no right at the beginning! Second, it's not _gonna_ happen! No way!"

"Whoa, whoa, you're all red, Dipper," Mabel said, turning toward him. "Let's run that through the Mabel Truth-o-Meter!" She held out her left arm, elbow bent, forearm horizontal. "Truth-o-Meter, tell me true, is Dipper lying to me or you?" For a second, nothing happened, and Mabel said, "Uh-oh, looks like you're in trouble, it's stuck at the big ol' fib mark!" Then she started to raise her hand. "Wait, wait, it's edging up toward 'half-truth.' Is it gonna make it all the way up?" Her hand rose to a vertical position. "Yes! Congratulations, young man, you told the truth for a change."

"This," Dipper said, "is stupid."

"Just teasing," Mabel said. "OK, relax, I believe you. First of all, I know you love Wendy and she, for some reason that God only knows, loves you. Second, and most important, if you snuck around and fooled around and did the dirty deed with Eloise—"

"Mabel!"

"—Wendy would know the instant you kissed her what you had been up to, and Dad would have to put in a new bathroom, 'cause she'd flat tear you a new one."

"OK," Dipper said. "Look, we've only got like three minutes to get to first period, so yes or no, will you back me up if this comes off the way Grunkle Ford's planning?"

"One condition," Mabel said. "Auditions are Wednesday, so tonight and tomorrow night you gotta listen to me practice my Cockney accent and sing and then give me a straight-from-the-shoulder, no-holds-barred critique so I can be sure of nailing the part of Eliza!" She grabbed him by his shirt front and shook him. "I want it, Dipper! I want it so bad!"

"I'll do that," he said, his teeth clicking. "Yes, I'll do that! I promise!"

"Eeaoww," she replied. "The rine in Spine should not de-lie the pline!"

"I'll help you work on it," he said, and they had to rush to get to class.

* * *

A few hours before that, out in Winnemunka, Mrs. Niedermeyer turned into the parking lot of the high school and asked, "What in the world?"

Eloise had been reaching around into the backseat, retrieving her backpack. She turned to see a county Mountie in his khaki uniform with the chocolate-colored campaign hat and pocket flaps, holding up a palm to stop them just inside the lot. He approached as Eloise's mom rolled down her window. "What's wrong, Officer?"

"You didn't get the word on the radio this morning, did you?" the state trooper—young, a little overweight, but not bad-looking—asked with a smile. "School's closed today because of a power outage. Tune into KACC for word about tomorrow, or check the school website. Should be fixed by then."

"That's why there's no buses," Eloise said, gazing around the strangely empty lot.

Her mom sighed. "Thank you, Officer." She turned around and they drove back the three miles to their house, complaining: "They need to put that alert system in, the one they've talked about for three years now. That way if there's a snow day or something like his, all the parents would get a robocall."

Eloise was only half listening. She was thinking _ghost_.

Oh, this kind of thing had happened once or twice before with no supernatural cause. The power lines were not terribly reliable. Once an auto accident had blown a transformer halfway through second period, causing everyone to have to board the buses and go home, and several times in the winters, lines came down because of freezing rain, and even if the roads were passable sometimes they had a snow day when there'd been no actual snow.

But not this time. She was sure of that.

Because she had looked past the state trooper to the glass front doors of the school. The hallway had been dark.

However, if the electricity at the school was really out—how could she have seen the bright red glow of the circular neon tube around the big East Chestnut High Eagles clock on the lobby wall?

* * *

The strangeness had only begun.

That morning at eleven-thirty, Mom was in the family office—the back room that she and Dad shared, with the computer and router and all in it—doing work-from-home, as she did three days a week.

She worked for an airline as a booking concierge, meaning essentially she helped customers find and make reservations for the best routes and connections for complicated travel, as well as packaging vacation tours and such—and Eloise was in her room reading that scary book again when the house phone rang.

Mom answered it, cutting off the second ring, and after a second, Eloise went into the hall and picked up the upstairs extension. She wasn't above a little bit of eavesdropping, especially when she was bored.

"—awful!" some woman's voice was saying. "Rodney told me that every classroom had just been trashed, and somebody had written death threats on nearly every whiteboard!"

"Who'd do something like that?" Mom asked.

"Some homicidal maniac, obviously!" the woman said. Eloise recognized the voice: Ruth Macavie. Her son Bracken—"Brick"—was on the football team, a fullback, and he dated Tammie Venneckie. Eloise had no idea who Rodney might be, though.

Eloise heard Mom's voice slide into that no-nonsense-now tone: "Ruthie! In Chestnut County? You know, it must have been a bunch of West Chestnut students. The football game's in two weeks—"

"How would they get in?" Mrs. Macavie demanded. "Rodney says that all the doors and windows were secure and locked, and the security cameras all went out at the same time—midnight, what do you think of_ that_?"

"Well—if they were vandals, that would be the logical time," Mrs. Niedermeyer said in a reasonable tone. "There's no one on guard, and—"

"But the door alarms didn't even go off!" Mrs. Macavie said, sounding excited to the near edge of hysteria. "The main door keypads weren't touched, so far as anyone can tell, and the back door's keyed, but it has an alarm on it too, and not one of the alarms went off! You realize what that means?"

"A ghost did it?" Mom asked, sounding sarcastic.

Mrs. Macavie's snort sounded like an upset piglet's protest. "Of_ course_ not! There are no such _things_! No, Penny, it means that the crazed murderer is hiding out in the school! Waiting for his victims! He's probably there _right now_!"

"I still think it's more likely boys from West Chestnut," Mom said. "I'm sure they have students who know how to do things like hack a security system. Ruthie, please let me call you back this evening. I've really got tons of work to get through."

Eloise heard Mrs. Macavie sniff. "Well, call me, then, after five. I'm trying to get a delegation of parents together to demand some action from the School Board."

"Let's talk about that later. Bye, Ruthie."

Click.

And then Mom said, "Eloise, I heard you pick up, and I know you're listening in. Come here this minute."

Grimacing, Eloise said, "Yes, Mom," and hung up.

She plodded down the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the office, where Mom, a pencil tucked over her right ear, sat at the desk tapping away at the keyboard. "That was incredibly rude of you," she said without even looking around.

Eloise squirmed. "I'm sorry, but I thought it might be Dad, that's all. And then I heard Brick's mom talking about vandalism, and—well, you know, the policeman told us that it was just a power outage, and I wondered why he'd lied."

"Obviously to keep parents and students from worrying and to keep wild rumors from getting out. With Ruth Macavie calling everybody in the county, though, that's certainly not going to work."

"I wonder how _she _found out," Eloise said.

"Pretty obvious. Her first husband, Rodney Dominick, works for the State Patrol."

"Oh," Eloise said. "I didn't know that."

"Mm, well, they were young and the marriage only lasted about two years, and then they divorced and she remarried Phil Macavie. There were no children, so unless Brick mentioned it—"

"I don't think he ever talks about it," Eloise said.

"Well, don't pry, please. Now, just do me a favor, Ellie," Mom said, sounding tired. "_Don't_ gossip about this. Don't spread rumors or make it sound worse than it really is. I'd bet anything it's just a bunch of rowdy football fans from West Chestnut trying to shake things up. Don't make people think it's an axe murderer hiding up in the school attic—"

"The school doesn't have an attic," Eloise pointed out, smiling.

"You know that and I know that," her mom agreed. "But don't spread wild talk about murderers or ghosts, OK? Promise me?"

"I won't talk to anybody at school about stuff like that," Eloise said. "I promise." She paused. "Are you gonna punish me for listening in on the phone?"

"Yes!" Mom said. "It's nearly noon. As punishment, go make us a couple of ham-and-cheese grilled sandwiches and, um, heat some of that tomato soup. The bisque, in the pantry on—"

"I know where it is," Eloise said. "Thanks, Mom. I'm sorry I eavesdropped, and I love you."

"Love you, too," Mrs. Niedermeyer said. "Now scoot! I've got to find a way to get thirty Daughters of the American Revolution from Minneapolis to London to Paris to Rome in less than six days."

_And I, _thought Eloise, _have to send a long email to Dipper Pines._

After all, she _had_ made her vow of silence carefully specific.


	5. Chapter 5

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 5: Three-Way**

**(September 26, 2016)**

That Monday evening—7:45 p.m. for Eloise, 5:45 for Dipper and Grunkle Ford—Dipper set up a three-way conference Yipe! call. Dipper had gone down to the basement—it was set up like the family library, with shelf upon shelf of books, plus some fairly scruffy but still comfortable odds and ends of furniture, like the old sofa, a small dining-nook sort of table that now was kind of a desk, and three mismatched chairs.

Dipper set his laptop up on the table, perched on one of the chairs, and called Grunkle Ford, whom he had to talk through logging on and finding the right spot on the Internet for the V/O hookup, and suddenly there he was, obviously in his school office, with a window behind him looking out over the lawn of the Institute. And—oh, God—he was wearing one of those sweatshirts Mabel had designed, the one that designated him as a professor at the Institute of Oddology.

"Oh, one thing," Dipper said, his embarrassment over his great-uncle's attire reminding him, "please don't call me 'Mason' while Eloise is on line with us. She only knows me as Dipper."

"Very well, Mason," Ford said, and then he chuckled. "I'm just pulling your leg. I'll make a note of it—Dipper."

Embarrassed all over again, Dipper murmured, "Thanks. Wait, your camera's misaligned. Move it a little to your left—too far, back a little. Can you hear me all right?"

"Fine."

"You're kind of soft. Where's your microphone?"

Ford blinked. "I . . . don't know. Wait, is it in this little camera perched up on the monitor?"

"Probably," Dipper said. "Sit a little closer. Now say something."

"Testing, _unus, duo, tres, quattor_."

Great, Latin. Oh, well. "Much better. Thanks, Grunkle Ford."

Just as Dipper was certain that Ford's setup was stable, Eloise checked in. Dipper's screen showed a small inset view of him—huh, really looked pretty good, the books in the background, and you couldn't see the exposed beams or the support pillars-and the rest of the screen split between Ford on the left and Eloise on the right. The other two saw similar setups, except for Ford the large pictures were Dipper and Eloise, and for Eloise, Dipper and Ford.

"Hi," Eloise said. "It's good to see you again, Dipper!"

"Good to see you, too," Dipper said. "Eloise, I'd like to introduce my great-uncle Stanford Pines, who's the President of the Institute of Anomalous Sciences. Grunkle Ford, this is Eloise Niedermeyer, who was with me when we ran into the entities at the Westminster House. Eloise, Grunkle Ford is the one who exorcised the evil influences that hung on in the house."

"A pleasure to meet you, Eloise," Ford said. "Dipper speaks very highly of your wit, intelligence, and calmness under pressure."

She smiled. "Thanks, uh, Dr? Is it Dr. Pines? I thought so. Dipper's told me a lot about you, too. I can see a real family resemblance, by the way."

"Eloise had a haunting problem in her home," Dipper said. "She found a way to solve it, though."

"Tell me about that one," Grunkle Ford said. "What was it like? Oh, do you mind if I call you Eloise?"

"No, everybody does," she said. "Well, let me think. It looked like a woman. I always saw her at the same spot, halfway down the basement stairs. The figure was transparent, gray, and really wispy, but she looked like she was wearing a long robe or gown. I'd start downstairs and click on the light, and there she was, her face turned up toward me, except she didn't have any features. I mean, I couldn't see her eyes, because she was so faint. She seemed to be holding onto the rail, staring up at me, but then as I looked, she'd just fade away over about five to ten seconds."

"That's excellent detail," Ford said. "Did she speak to you? Interact with you, or with anything, physically?"

Eloise shook her head. Dipper noticed that her light-brown hair was a little longer than he remembered from more than two years earlier, but her eyes were still the attractive blue-gray he remembered.

"She never made a sound," Eloise said. "And never touched me. We didn't hear, you know, the cliché ghost sounds. No creaking or moaning or chains rattling. I—now, I can't back this up, it's just a feeling—I sort of thought she was from pioneer days, or maybe a Native American. I don't know why. Our house isn't all that old—I think it was built in the 1920s—but Dad once told me it replaced a farmhouse that dated from about the Civil War era, and that one burned down, and ours was built on the same foundation."

"So it would use the same cellar," Ford said. "I see. Dipper, what did you think?"

"It sounded to me like a low-grade Category Four specter," Dipper said. "It wasn't image-based, though, so I figured it was a needy ghost—one that had lost its way and didn't know how to get to the afterlife. I found a ritual of aid and passed it along to Eloise."

"And I kept the printout with the ritual right inside the basement door," Eloise said. "I folded and hid it, sort of, on the shelf with the flashlight and the fuses and stuff, behind the cardboard box that holds spare batteries, and the next time I saw her, I pulled out the paper and read the exorcism, and it worked. I saw her face for the first and only time, real briefly, and she looked so happy and grateful."

"Were you frightened?" Ford asked.

Eloise twisted her mouth to one side. "Umm. No, I wouldn't say _frightened_. I was nervous, but not scared of her. And I felt so peaceful after she, you know, found her way and went on."

"You did an exceptionally kind thing," Ford said. "All right. Now, about this poltergeist that you suspect to be at work in your high school—"

"First, I got the answers to your three questions," Eloise said. "We had no school today, so I talked to some people. This morning Dad told me that before the school was on the site—it started construction in 1964 and opened in 1966—there was an old funeral home at the same address, but that building was close to the street, he thinks a little to the left of the driveway into the bus-loading area. The funeral home relocated in the late fifties, though, and the building stood empty until the county demolished it to make way for the school."

"Suggestive," Ford said. "If you can find out details, and, let me see, oh, yes, an aerial photo from the fifties would be useful if you could find one from later on that shows the school—"

"I can learn more details, and I'll find out about the photos. I'll email you and Dipper, if you want."

"Fine." Ford was leaning forward, obviously interested in Eloise's story.

She said, "Dad thinks the funeral home had been there for about fifty years until it moved. Before that, the land along the road there was just open country. There's no rumors about Native American burial sites or anything. OK, now you also wanted to know if any physical changes have been made to the school. The track was re-paved last summer, and a year or two ago new lights were put in for the school stadium, and there's been some repainting inside, but nothing else for a long time back."

"Excellent, thank you," Ford said. "Ma—uh, may I say, Dipper, that I like Eloise? She's organized!"

Nodding her thanks, Eloise said, "Last, nobody's stayed overnight in the school ever, as far as anybody I've asked knows. Dad went to the school, and he said that's not the kind of prank any student would think up. I tend to agree with him."

Ford jotted down some notes. "I may send Dipper some follow-up queries for him to edit before sending them to you, but thank you very much for running down these answers."

"You're welcome, and I've got more news," Eloise said. "I emailed a little bit about it to Dipper, but let me tell you both the whole story."

So she spoke about finding the school closed that morning, and about Mrs. Macavie's call to her mom. "So later, I called Brick Macavie—"

"Brick?" asked Ford, who was taking notes.

"Bracken," Eloise said. "That's his real name, but he's a football player, so, you know, nickname—Brick. He's a Junior, one year behind me. Anyway, he's Mrs. Macavie's son. Now, I didn't know this until today, but before his mom married Mr. Macavie, she was married briefly to a guy named, shoot, I forgot—just a minute." She looked at a small pocket notebook. "Got it here somewhere. Rodney Dominick, that's the name. And now he's a lieutenant in the State Patrol, and he came to the high school and investigated the vandalism, and Mrs. Macavie called him when Brick came home so early and told her school was closed. She got the story from Lieutenant Dominick."

"That's clear," Ford said. "And I suppose you learned more details when you spoke to Brick?"

Eloise nodded. "OK, here's what he told me: All the classrooms had the desks turned over and the contents scattered everywhere, some even tossed up on top of the light fixtures. All the lockers were standing open and empty. Tomorrow the kids are going to have to pick out their belongings from boxes full of the stuff the janitors and teachers picked up. Nothing seemed to be broken, but it was scattered, all cluttered up together. Nobody knows yet if anything is missing. All the combination locks were piled up in one place, outside the lunchroom. But the real scary thing was that in every room where there was a whiteboard and markers, somebody had scrawled death threats on the boards. Brick said his mom's ex-husband mentioned a few. I wrote down what he remembered of them. These might not be accurate."

"Why?" Dipper asked.

"Well, you know—like a game of telephone," Eloise said. "Somebody told somebody who told somebody, and first thing you know, it's all exaggerated and twisted."

"Very astute," Ford said. "What were the messages?"

Eloise cleared her throat and then read her list: "_Jane Hochsler will bleed. I will rip out Gene Fredericks's eyes. Kamfer must die. Burn in hell, Dana Waller."_ She looked up. "There were lots more, but that's all Brick thought he could remember. Those are all students, except for Kamfer."

"Serious threats," Ford mused. "But no one's been hurt so far?"

"No. One boy was scared."

"That was the other football player," Dipper said. "What's his name?"

"Tanner Berlinger," Eloise said. "Yeah, he said she threatened him, too. Said she was coming to get him."

Ford adjusted his glasses. "But he wasn't physically attacked?"

"No, just scared. He won't talk to me about it, but his girlfriend and I are friends, and he told her everything, so I've got pretty much the whole story from her."

Ford jotted a few more things down. "Hm. Threats but no injuries. That's a hopeful sign. However, these manifestations unfortunately tend to increase in severity. I think my first impulse is best. I'll equip Dipper with special materials and instructions, and this weekend he'll come out to Minnesota and perform a cleansing ritual that ought to do the trick. It's imperative to act soon—if this thing does injure a living person, particularly if it sheds someone's blood, then events will escalate quickly and unpredictably. Fortunately, we probably have pretty fair leeway for that."

"You're coming out?" Eloise asked Dipper, smiling.

"Grunkle Ford says he can arrange for me to fly into—uh, what airport, Grunkle Ford?" Dipper asked.

"Minneapolis-St. Paul," Grunkle Ford said. "Unless there's a closer one."

"Rochester International's better," Eloise said. "It's about thirty-five or forty miles. Minneapolis-St. Paul is, like, seventy-five miles away."

"Rochester it is," Ford said, making a note.

"Uh, I'm not sure I can borrow a car to drive out and pick him up," Eloise said apologetically.

"That is not a problem," Ford said. "I'll arrange transportation for him. He'll fly out on Friday afternoon as early as possible and probably land in the evening, given the time difference. I'll notify him when the flight details are final, and he can let you know when to expect him. You two can arrange a meeting place. Now, there is the question of how to get into the school at night—do you think the principal would be amenable to escorting the two of you inside if I get in touch with him?"

"Maybe," Eloise said. "His name is Kamfer, and he's one of the people the ghost threatened with the scrawls on the board. He thinks it's vandals, and I know he wants to get to the bottom of this."

"Kamfer," Ford said. "Spell it." He wrote the name down as she did. Then he said, "I'll ask you for a contact number. The school office number will be fine, but that can wait until tomorrow morning. Right now, let me explain some things to you. I can honestly represent myself as a paranormal investigator to Mr. Kamfer and can provide him with bona fides to show I can be trusted. What I propose to do is, well, not exactly deceptive, but—let's call it an undercover mission. Dipper, I'm going to send you some credentials. They'll show that you're twenty-one years old, so, I don't know, dress older than you are. You're going to be my assistant. Take your ghost-detecting kit with you, and I'll overnight to you some materials and a list of other paraphernalia you should be able to gather in Piedmont. The package ought to be there by Wednesday. Oh, also be sure to have your own drivers' license—"

"Grunkle Ford, I'm not old enough to rent a car," Dipper pointed out. "Even if I can pass for twenty-one, that's still—"

"It won't be a rental," Ford reassured him. "I know an Agency that will supply a car for you."

_Oh. Agency with a capital A._ "All right," Dipper said, understanding.

"Hey, Dippingsauce!" Mabel's voice, from the top of the basement stairs. "Mom says to come and eat or she's gonna make you wash dishes every night for the rest of the month!"

"Gotta go," Dipper said.

"I'll communicate more details to you both," Ford said. "Eloise, if you'll stay on the line for a few minutes, I'll need some information and we can exchange electronic-mail addresses."

"Bye, Dipper," she said. "I'll stay online," she told Ford. "I just looked up the school office number . . . ."

Dipper turned off and closed his laptop. At the top of the stairs, Tripper greeted him as if he'd been ten years away at the Trojan War and then another ten years on the way home. _Wow_! his dance said. _So glad you're back, I love you, you're my best friend, oh—wow_!

It cheered Dipper up. "Good dog," he said, and Tripper led him to the dinner table.


	6. Chapter 6

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 6: An Actor Prepares**

**(September 27-28, 2016)**

Eloise and Dipper kept texting back and forth. On Tuesday morning, nothing more had happened at East Chestnut High, except that the confusion when the students began to rummage through the boxes for the jumbled-up contents of their lockers was horrendous and took all of first period.

Eloise said the principal, Mr. Omar Kamfer, had given up on the power-outage cover story, since that didn't account for the locker vandalism and rumors were flying wild. In the afternoon, just before dismissal, he had called everyone into the gym, as if for a pep rally, but instead he spoke briefly—fifteen minutes if that—to tell the students, teachers, and staff that the school had a vandalism problem, but security was being stepped up, so on and so forth. He took no questions.

That night, Mr. Jespersen, the elderly head janitor, became the temporary night watchman. He slept on a cot in the teachers' break room, with an alarm clock to wake him up once every two hours to walk the hall and check for vandals.

He found none on his ten o'clock and midnight patrols, but a little past two a.m. he called the county police. "Somebody's in here with me!" he insisted. He stood out front until the patrol car with a couple of troopers showed up. All three of them went inside, roamed the halls, and found no one, but Mr. Jespersen insisted, "Last time I walk in the halls, I hear somebody stepping soft behind me, but they hide when I turn around!"

"Well, there's nobody here now," one of the troopers said.

Jespersen couldn't face going back inside alone. Instead he got in his car and went home at 2:45.

When he and the other janitor showed up to open the school on Tuesday morning, they found a bizarre effigy in the entrance hall. Someone had arranged a mop, an artist's smock from the art room, a padded pair of football pants from some kid's locker in the gym, and a pair of soft shoes that Mrs. Langolin, the French and Spanish teacher, kept under her desk. Laid out on the floor, they were in a rough mannikin shape. Except the mop had been broken, and the head lay about five feet from the body. And someone had dumped a half-gallon container of ketchup from the lunchroom between the head and the body.

On the wall above the mock corpse someone had written in the same slashy, jagged handwriting that the whiteboards had been covered with the dire message COMING FOR REAL SOON.

A little enigmatic, but menacing enough. The janitors cleaned everything up except for the writing on the wall, which seemed to have been done with red permanent marker. It wouldn't come off easily, and the teachers were already showing up with students no doubt due right after them, so Mr. Kamfer borrowed a big poster from the library—"READ TO IMAGINE"—and taped it up over the writing.

It hung a little low, but it covered the problem. The janitors told him they would attack the marker defacement with alcohol and acetone after school. That might take off some paint, but it worked on permanent markers.

Of course even with that effort, word of the effigy leaked out, and Eloise reported it to Dipper in a series of long texts on Wednesday morning.

* * *

Back west in Piedmont on Tuesday afternoon, Grunkle Ford's package arrived—a day early, but then Ford probably had the Agency ferry the package down, Dipper supposed.

He opened it and found a three-ring binder with a plan of action and directions for dealing with six different types of apparitions and malicious poltergeists, along with tests to determine if what was troubling the school really was a ghost—or some other kind of manifestation.

The package also included ten stoppered vials of consecrated water, triple-refined and fortified goofer dust, sanction oil, and other chemicals that, Dipper supposed, might come in useful. A tube that looked like lipstick was with the vials.

He looked through the notebook and saw a diagram of a protective pentacle. A smaller box inside the package held five special white candles, a pair of "parascope" goggles that allowed one not only to see in darkness, but also to see invisible paranormal forces, so on and so forth. Finally, in a plastic case, he found an expensive-looking wristwatch with a black expansion bracelet.

Ford included the ID materials as well: A leather trifold with a photo of Dipper, shopped to make him look older and with black-rimmed spectacles added, a gold-colored badge with US AGENT and a serial number engraved on it, and an ID card with a similar but smaller photo of him that identified him as SPECIAL AGENT SECOND GRADE M.A. Pines, with the same serial number as on the badge, a California office address for the Agency for Special Investigations, and phone numbers—one was his own cell and the other was OFFICE.

And there were the glasses, or a close imitation. Dipper tried them on. The lenses were clear polycarbonate, no prescription.

Finally, Ford had included a handwritten letter:

* * *

_Mason—_

_I've laid the groundwork for your cover story. Anyone calling the office number will get someone who works in your office, knows you, and will vouch for you. Dress soberly—a black suit and tie, white shirt, would be ideal. Wear the glasses. They look ordinary, but in the presence of paranormal emanations, you will notice a tiny red warning light in the upper left part of the left lens. It's subtle, and no one else will notice it in daylight, though it is visible, faintly, at night to anyone looking directly at you. The goggles will fit over the spectacles, so take both to the investigation._

_Our field operative specialist tells me to advise you not to shave. A little scruff will make you look older. Experiment with changing your hair style. If you want to comb it back and conceal your birthmark, use the tube of Pancote I've included. It's a water-resistant makeup that blends with your skin coloration and only a light coating will conceal anything like tattoos or birthmarks._

_Practice pitching your normal voice slightly lower. Speak deliberately, as though you had no sense of humor whatever. If you can manage to make your voice husky, that also projects an idea of an older youth._

_Now: If you get in any kind of trouble, CALL ME AT ONCE, no matter what the time. If for some reason you cannot reach or use your phone, press the two buttons on each side of the watch face simultaneously. That activates a communicator that will call me directly._

_Review the steps in the "Investigation Protocol" document in the binder. Above all, before you attempt the exorcism, make certain you know what you are up against. An anti-poltergeist spell won't work against a demonic manifestation, for example. Suit the treatment to the malady._

_Stanley will call your parents today. He will lead them to believe that you are coming up because the University is working out your financial support and you've asked me to go with you. We'll cover for you through Monday night if necessary._

_If you cannot discern the nature of the paranormal threat, retreat! Call me, and I will dispatch some Agents, although I'm reluctant to take that step because the branch that has responsibility for the upper Midwest consists of, between you and me, cowboys who must be carefully supervised lest they overstep their bounds._

_All right: On Friday afternoon, a car will call for you at your school as classes are dismissed for the day. You will be driven to the Oakland airport and will board a chartered jet—actually an Agency plane—for a direct flight to Minnesota. An Agent from the West Coast branch will accompany you on the fight and will drive with you to Winnemunka. There is only one motel in the small town, and you and the Agent will take adjoining rooms. The reservations have been made and prepayment has been sent._

_You may drive the car for whatever time it takes. Your rendezvous with Eloise we'll leave up to the two of you. The Agent will drive you back to the airport but will remain on site for any mopping up that may be required, so you will fly back to Oakland on your own._

_Good luck, young man!_

_With pride, your great-uncle _

_Stanford_

_PS: This document will self-destruct ten minutes after it is exposed to light._

* * *

The pride was a nice touch, but Dipper tried to swallow all his apprehension. He didn't exactly feel like Double-O Pines.

He watched the paper shrivel up into a small wet spot on his desk. Yep, ten minutes exactly.

On Tuesday evening he helped Mabel, who had been listening to British songs and movies to help her with the accents. She wanted to pick out an audition song—"The rules say we can sing songs similar to the ones in _My Fair Lady, _but not ones from the show." She settled on one from _Camelot, _"The Lusty Month of May," because it had qualities, she said, like those of "I Could Have Danced All Night." Dipper listened to her and approved.

In addition to singing, the tryouts would include readings from the script—anyone wanting to try out had been given various short scenes, including Eliza's coming to ask Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering to give her speech lessons, the Ascot racing scene with Eliza, Freddy, and Freddy's mother, a teaching scene with Eliza, Mrs. Pearce, Higgins, and Pickering, a scene with Eliza and her father, Alfred Doolittle, and finally one with Eliza and Higgins's mother.

There were others, but since they didn't include Eliza, Mabel hadn't picked them up.

Mabel recorded her practices of singing and then of dialogue. Dipper read the other parts and cued her, and she did—Dipper thought—a very good approximation of a Cockney accent. For the post-transformation proper-English scenes, she sounded posh but a little bit stilted, and they worked on getting a more natural feel.

"Will you come to tryouts with me tomorrow night? Please?" Mabel asked him.

"I'll go with you, but I'm not auditioning," Dipper said. "It's just—you know, not my thing."

"But you'll be there, and I can see you and feel that somebody is in my corner," Mabel said. "Thanks, Brobro!"

He told her about his own need for a disguise, and she bounced up. "Makeover time!"

A jolt of horror flooded through him. It was as though he were twelve and Mabel's sleepover posse had jumped him. "Mabel, no, please!"

"Just you wait, Dipper Pines, just you wait!" she sang, and he had to chuckle.

She sat him down in front of her makeup table and explained what she was doing.

First, she brushed back and parted his hair. "Get a haircut," she advised. "Just a trim. We're goin' for a Zac look here. Leave it a little bit unruly, not too slick. Now, here we go!"

She turned him around and tilted her head. "Frist—the birthmark, yes or no?"

"I have something for it," Dipper said. He tried out the Pancote, and his Big Dipper birthmark vanished under the thinnest of applications. With something called a "brow fluffer"—a brush that went into a tube of brownish-colored makeup—Mabel darkened and thickened his eyebrows. Fortunately, he was past the pimply stage. However, she delicately used the same eyebrow brush on his scruff. "Gotta do this carefully so you don't get streaks on your chin. Against the grain, like this. Yeah, that's good. Now take a look," she said, pointing to the mirror.

"Huh!" he said.

There he was—OK, not Zac, not even a reasonable facsimile, but a serious-looking young dude with scruff that almost looked like a close-trimmed beard. "Now," Mabel said, "Let your whiskers grow for the next couple days, and when the time comes, you wear a suit and your good black shoes—shine them!—and we got ourselves a smokin' hot young professional. But do the Eliza Doolittle bit, too! Let me hear you talk!"

"First come to my room," Dipper said. When they got there, he put on his Navy blue blazer and the fake spectacles. Then he straightened his shoulders—he remembered Agent Trigger had posture suggestive of a stick inserted you-know-where and shoved up his spine—and lowered his voice. "Good afternoon, ma'am. I need to ask you a few questions."

Mabel half-smiled and shook her head. "Mm—not quite right. Hey, how about that guy in the old time movies that Dad likes so much? The cop movie guy? Can you sound like him?"

Dipper squinted and tilted his head. Then in a husky, soft voice, he said, "I know what you're thinkin'. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement I kinda forgot myself. So you have to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?"

Mabel jumped up and down. "Ooh, that's it, that's it! I tell you what," Mabel said grinning. "If you weren't my brother I'd climb all over you!"

"Ew, gross," Dipper said.

She punched his shoulder. "Just messin' with you. But practice that, and I think you can pull it off. Hey—let your scruff really grow next spring and then try the whole bit on Wendy! Betcha anything she'll move up the date of the wedding, like to about five seconds after she catches sight of you."

She went back to her room to practice the readings. Dipper went into the bathroom and practiced his stance and his voice.

Lord, his reflection looked so confident! It looked the way he wished he could feel.

But the look, the presentation, the—what was the word?—the persona was half the battle. Yeah. He'd practice. And if he needed to sound all serious and professional, he could take Grunkle Ford as a model.

Huh. Maybe Mabel was right—maybe he could pull this off.


	7. Chapter 7

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 7: A Trying Time**

**(September 28, 2016)**

On Wednesday afternoon, Eloise reported no new phenomena. By then Ford had given Dipper his ETA for landing in Minnesota—he would take off from Oakland at 4:00 on Friday afternoon, which he thought was cutting it close—just forty-five minutes after the end of school—and after a three-hour flight and a two-hour time difference, he'd arrive in Rochester at 9:15. He and his driver would be at the Gopher Inn by eleven.

Eloise texted, _Too late for us to meet. How about I come meet you for breakfast at Sven's Pancake Palace on Sat at about 8? It's next to the motel, not too bad for breakfast._

And he responded, _Do I need to drive over and pick you up?_

She said, _No, only a mile from home, and I'll ride my bike over. I'll tell my folks I need the exercise._

Dipper hesitated before texting, _1 more thing. Don't be surprised when you see me. I'm kind of in disguise. Have u talked to the principal?_

And Eloise replied: _Ur great-uncle is calling him. He will think u are a paranormal investigator & know me. Well u r an investigator, sorry, didn't mean it that way!_

At that point, the fifth-period English teacher turned from the board, and Dipper put away his phone. No need to get busted for texting in class. Not when he already felt so keyed up.

As soon as class ended, he replied to her: _Srry, was in class. Not offended. C U Sat a.m!_

* * *

"Mr. Kamfer, it's my pleasure to speak with you. I'm Dr. Stanford Pines, President of the Institute of Anomalous Sciences. I understand you're having a vandal problem."

Kamfer's voice was Midwestern and as flat as the prairie. "Well, yes, something's going on. How did you hear about this?"

Ford said, "That's not important, but I will warn you that this sort of phenomenon is impossible to keep under wraps. If it isn't stopped early, then it will escalate until your school will be splashed on the screens of every television set in the nation."

"We wouldn't want that!" Kamfer said hastily.

"No, and that's wise of you," Ford told him. "If you will agree, I can arrange for a paranormal investigator to come and resolve your problem. It won't cost you or the school a penny, providing you agree to let the young man make recordings and notes to be made anonymous—the school and any of the people there in Winnemunka would be given fictitious names, you understand—and share those with our research staff."

"Why?" the principal asked.

"Because it's a rare opportunity for us. Let me tell you what I've gleaned from second-hand reports, which are no doubt exaggerated, and then please correct any details that I have wrong. Again, I promise you and the school anonymity."

"Well—I don't know—it might be kids from a rival school."

"Precisely," Ford said. "That would be the thrust of our investigation, you see—to determine whether the disturbances have a natural explanation or are paranormal. In either case, our investigator will share all findings with you in strictest confidence. Let me tell you what I've learned."

For five minutes, Ford gave Kamfer a succinct account of the events as reported to him by Dipper and Eloise. Once or twice he thought he heard the principal whimper softly. When he finished, he asked, "How accurate is that information?"

"Extremely," Kamfer said. The first boy, Tanner, did report encountering a, well, for want of a better word, a ghost. However—now, this is still confidential, isn't it?"

"Absolutely."

He heard Kamfer take a deep breath. "Well—that wasn't really the first episode. It started before the school year began."

* * *

Ford listened patiently as Kamfer outlined some typical poltergeist activity. A month before school started, the principal and some of the staff were already on duty, attending to all the details that had to be taken care of before the students arrived. "I stayed late one evening. Well, it wasn't dark, it was oh, maybe seven o'clock, and someone tapped softly on my office door. I opened it and no one was there. The lobby was empty. So I thought it might be the HVAC system, and I closed the door, and instantly someone tapped on it again—it was a light but distinct knock. I tore the door open and stepped out into the lobby. No one. Behind me, the office door slammed. I could not open it—it was locked. My key wouldn't work. I had to call a locksmith."

Ford asked, "Did he unlock it?"

"No. A key had been inserted on the inside of the office and broken off so the shaft plugged the keyhole. The locksmith had to remove and replace the lock. We found the head of the broken key just inside the office, on the floor, and no one in the secretary's area, the inner office, or the closets. The windows were closed and locked on the inside. There was no way anyone could have left."

"The ceiling tiles? Ford asked. "The heat vents?"

"Nothing larger than a cat could creep through the vents, and that part of the building has a solid wood ceiling, not hanging tiles."

The next week Kamfer had the motion-detecting cameras installed. "We never saw any human in the recordings," he said. "Just things—happening. The lockers—locks fell off and all the doors banged open at the same time. Once on the video recordings it looked as if a serious fire broke out in the library—whole place was ablaze. But nothing had been burned or even scorched, there was no smell of smoke—I'm worried, Dr. Pines."

"It certainly sounds as if we're dealing with the paranormal," Ford said. "We need to investigate and end this before someone is hurt, or worse. If I arrange for a young government agent to investigate and solve your problem at no cost, only for the knowledge we can gain, and if we do this in strict confidence, will you agree?"

After a thoughtful pause, Kamfer responded with a question of his own: "I have to, don't I?"

"No," Ford said in a kind voice. "It's your choice. However, I will say that I believe this is your best hope. The police are of no help in situations like this, and as a rule, even clergymen no longer perform exorcisms. Physical force is useless. Please allow us to send the agent to investigate. I can't guarantee results, of course, but at a minimum we'll have a firm understanding of what you're facing and how serious it is."

"Is the agent a good man?"

"He is exceptionally competent," Ford said. "I know him very well indeed. He has worked closely with me on a number of paranormal events, and I have every confidence in him. You'll think him too young when you see him, but trust me—he has the experience of a much older man. In fact, he's my nephew, Mason Pines, already an Agent Second Class with—well, I can't really name the agency. It is official, but clandestine, and it deals with just such problems as yours. I can have him there by Saturday morning."

"Fine," Kamfer said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Just meet him at the school and make the facility available to him," Ford said. "He may be in company with one of your students who has experienced the phenomena."

"Is that student one of your informants?" asked Kamfer.

Quietly, Ford replied, "I'm not at liberty to say. You understand."

A long pause. Then Kamfer said, "Confidentiality. Yes."

"And I'll trust you not to reveal the student's identity to anyone else. Do I have your word?"

"You do, Dr. Pines. Ah—must I sign an agreement or-?"

"Not at all," Ford said. "In fact, Mr. Kamfer, as far as the world is concerned, this conversation never happened. Is that acceptable?"

Kamfer sounded like a drowning man who had just spotted a life preserver floating within reach. "Yes. Oh, yes. Certainly! Saturday, did you say? Let me give you my mobile number."

* * *

Back in Piedmont that evening, most unusually for her, Mabel didn't eat any dinner at all. When their mom urged her to have _something,_ at least, Mabel munched a third of a protein bar and knocked back a double shot of Mabel juice. Even then she moaned, "Aggh, I'm all butterflies and bugs in my stomach, Mom! How can I eat? My dramatic future hangs in the balance!"

Dad said reassuringly, "Nonsense. You've been deep in drama ever since you were fourteen. You'll do fine."

Again unusually, Dipper took the wheel as the twins drove the short distance to the school—they could easily walk it at a brisk pace in half an hour—and Mabel kept clutching her stomach and muttering, "Don't throw up, don't throw up, don't throw up."

"Get a grip, Mabel," Dipper said. "Just ride it out. Take some deep breaths. Stop worrying so much. You're prepared. Just, I don't know, relax and enjoy it."

She gave him a sickly smile. "Thanks," she said. "But it ain't easy!"

The hopeful Higginses and Doolittles and Elizas were making their way into the school auditorium. Dipper and Mabel joined them, thirty or forty other students, and took aisle seats on the right side. Mr. Lecroix, one of the two music teachers, and Mrs. Bane, the drama teacher, were sitting on the edge of the stage, casually dressed in khakis, sneakers, and Piedmont High tee shirts, legs swinging. The stage itself had a scarred upright piano and a small table with a pitcher of water and paper cups.

Promptly at 7:00, Mrs. Bane stood up, scanned the students—who fell quiet in expectation—and said, "I think this must be it! I'm happy to see such a great turn-out. I've been counting heads and the good news is I think everyone here will be in the play." She smiled. "The bad news is, not everyone can get a big part. But there really are no small parts, there are only actors who have small roles and if they're good and sneaky, steal every scene they're in!"

Mr. Lecroix had risen and handed around a stack of audition questionnaires—Dipper got one, though he wasn't trying out, and noticed it had blanks for hair color, eye color, height and weight, and check-off boxes for things like singing and dancing experience and near the end asked what audition song each student would sing, if any. And as a parting shot, the questionnaire asked two questions: _What role(s) are you most interested in? If not chosen for your preferred role, will you accept another part?_

As everyone scribbled away on these, Mrs. Bane explained they were going to begin with music auditions. After a couple of minutes, she took up the sheets and said, "Now, not all the roles are singing ones. Those of you who are interested in non-singing parts, hold up your hands. Excellent. All right, in the back there is Mr. Preston—stand up and wave, Benny—see him? Those of you not interested in singing go with him next door to the band practice room, and he'll have you read some scenes."

About a third of the students went out with Mr. Preston. "All right," Mrs. Bane said. "Now, this play is about a lady and a gentleman, so we are going to hear you ladies first. Who's a hopeful Eliza?"

Seven girls.

"Are you all sopranos?"

All but Sara Ivy, who was an alto.

"Did you all bring sheet music?"

Yes. Yes, they had.

"Come up onto the stage and line up, please," she said. Mabel squeezed Dipper's hand—her hand was like ice—and she went up with the others and stood second in line, shifting from foot to foot.

Mrs. Bane knew all of them—well, Piedmont wasn't that big a school—and called them all by name. Then she said, "We'll listen to each of you. There's a two-minute limit, so don't feel bad if we cut you off. Marta, give your music to Mr. Lecroix and tell us what you're going to sing."

In a tiny voice, Marta, who was, in Dipper's opinion, too buff to be a convincing Eliza—though she was a great tennis player—said, "I'm going to sing 'All I Ask of You.' Uh, it's from _Phantom of the Opera. _Uh, one, uh one verse and the chorus."

Mr. Lecroix played the introduction, and the nervous Marta missed the beat and came in late. One bar in, Mr. Lecroix stopped playing and said gently, "Let's try that again. Don't be scared, Marta."

But she was rattled, and her song came out only so-so.

Next up was Mabel. She handed Mr. Lecroix her music.

Then, incredibly, with an ear-to-ear smile, she stepped forward and announced, "Hi, everybody! I'm Mabel Pines, and I'm going to sing 'The Lusty Month of May,' Guinevere's song from _Camelot. _Maestro Lecroix, if you please!"

Mr. Lecroix caught her grin—it was infectious—and played the upbeat intro with panache.

Dipper sat back in his seat and as Mabel's voice trilled and soared, he found himself tearing up. Mabel was . . . wonderful. She didn't belt out the song, but she sang it with energy, impish glee, and a contagious joy, dead on-key and with a regal grace in her arm and body movements that he hadn't known she possessed. One of the other girls on stage dropped out of line, turned and walked off, evidently giving up.

Mrs. Bane didn't even stop Mabel—she sang past the two-minute deadline, all the way through the song, and then she did a cute curtsy.

And the guys and girls in the seats waiting their turn applauded.

Mabel's gaze caught his, and Dipper did an air-punch. She raised her hands to her face and for a moment just quivered.

The other four girls sang their songs, and, in Dipper's opinion, didn't come close to Mabel's ease and natural delivery. Mrs. Bane dismissed the Elizas to the practice room. "If you don't get it," Dipper told his sister as they walked from the auditorium, "they're crazy."

"Still gotta act," she said, her voice shaky. "But thanks, Brobro."

"How'd you get over your nervousness?"

She gave him a wide-eyed glance. "Are you kidding? I'm_ still_ scared silly! But I decided an actress could _act_ like she was confident, so that's what I did!"

Shaking his head, Dipper said, "Sometimes I wish I were more like you."

Mabel nudged him in the ribs. "We could send up to the Shack for the electron carpet."

He rolled his eyes. "I don't wish_ that_ hard. Break a leg, Sis."

In groups of four and five and six, the students went back into the auditorium and read through the scenes they had been given. Mabel went last of the six remaining competitors for the role. Two of them couldn't master the British accents. The other three were pretty decent, though one was nervous and flubbed a few words. Then it was Mabel's turn.

She had three short bits: Eliza coming to Professor Higgins's home and explaining in her Cockney accent that she wants to learn proper English, like a lady in a flower shop. Then with a different Higgins and Pickering, one of the difficult learning scenes, the one in which Eliza has to learn the cadence of "How kind of you to let me come." And finally, she did one of the later scenes, the confrontation with Higgins when she's triumphed at the Embassy Ball, but she feels lost and frightened of the future, for though she can now speak perfectly good upper-class English, she has no prospects—and who'd hire a shop girl who sounds like a lady?

Though she stood with the other actors and read from the page, she—unlike all the other Eliza hopefuls—accompanied her voice with gestures of her free hand and with body language, reacting in surprise or weariness or anger as the scene called for.

Dipper was sitting in the row behind Mrs. Bane and Mr. Lecroix, and he couldn't hear what they were saying, but they seemed to be reacting very favorably to Mabel's audition, making notes and murmuring to each other.

When Mabel's last scene concluded, after the two teachers had a brief whispered conference, Mrs. Bane stood and said, "All right, Eliza. Now show us some movement. You're at the Ascot opening race. The song has been sung, and the race has started, and your horse Dover is in third place, but moving up—go!"

On stage, Mabel tensed, leaning forward and watching an invisible horse race with visibly swelling excitement on her face and in her attitude and stance. Clenching her fists—no, she'd crossed her fingers in hope—and moving her arms as if she were the jockey holding the reins, he started to murmur, "Come, on, Dover!" She kept repeating that, her voice becoming louder and more excited, until with utter abandon, she jumped in the air and shouted, "Come ON, Dover! Move yer bloomin' arse!"

Moment of silence.

Then "Welcome to the cast, Miss Doolittle," Mrs. Bane said, and Mabel hugged the latest Higgins, Pickering, and Freddy, weeping with joy.


	8. Chapter 8

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 8: Nervous**

**(September 29, 2016)**

On Thursday Dipper began to attract attention with his five o'clock shadow. His mom nagged him a little about his appearance, but he said, "I just want to look like a college student when I go up to Gravity Falls." She shook her head but seemed to accept that.

He definitely had a bristle of whiskers, and at school a couple of the girls gave him speculative glances, as if he had just materialized and they had not been aware of his presence before.

That morning at ten, Stan called the Pines parents with a request to fill out an assessment of needs form for him. "It's short. I got it from the college, and Sheila's showin' me how to put it in an email, so I'm sending it to you right now. Just download it, fill it out, ya know, ballpark figures, but be ready to back 'em up with tax return copies if the college asks, and then email it back to me as an attachment. A PDQ will be fine."

"PDF?" Alex Pines asked with a grin. It was one of his work-from-home days, a perk now that he had received another promotion.

"Yeah, that's just as good," Stan replied. "Look, this is one of those red-tape dealies, mostly just busy work but mandatory, OK? I mean, with his savings, Dip's already covered for college, though that dumb place costs a nominal egg. But they provisionally granted him a scholarship that'll also help, and this will just confirm that, and hey, don't look in a horse's mouth when he's got money in his pocket, am I right?"

"Nominal egg?" Alex asked.

"An arm and a leg," Stan said more clearly. "Email's sent."

The one-page document wasn't hard to fill out, so Mr. Pines quickly completed it and emailed it back to Stan, who printed it out and then crumpled it up and tossed it in the wastebasket. He told Alex by return email, "I filed it, thanks."

On that same Thursday at the Institute of Anomalous Sciences, Ford had lunch with Dr. Edward Carroll, who had made an exhaustive study of apparition and ghost phenomena for thirty years and who had written six authoritative books in the field. He was a stellar find for the Institute, an accomplished and respected academic already retired at fifty-eight, but bored in retirement, and he'd jumped at the appointment to the faculty when Ford offered it.

"I'm honored to accept, but I honestly don't know how many years of teaching I've got left in me," he'd warned Ford when he offered the job.

"I'll take as many as you have," Ford had replied.

Whatever, the work had rejuvenated a bored Carroll, who proved to be energetic, brilliant, and inspiring in his lessons and who now looked like he'd have at a minimum another twelve years of teaching left in him.

As they carried their lunch trays into the President's small conference room that noon, Carroll said, "Dr. Pines, I don't think I've yet properly thanked you for talking me into coming out of retirement. I must say, in thirty years in the field, I have never taught anywhere half as collegial, stimulating, and accepting as here. It's refreshing!"

"Call me Ford, please," Stanford said as they sat down. "Edward, I knew from the beginning that you'd be a wonderful professor. Your students speak glowingly of you."

Carroll, a short, slight man with a pepper-and-salt goatee and a fringe of graying hair, smiled. "My friends call me Ted. And that's kind of the young people. I find them hard workers. It will be difficult at the end of term to turn in grades that describe a perfect bell curve! They're all either exceptionally bright or industrious enough to make up the difference."

As he took the lid off his cup of coffee, Ford said, "Edward—forgive me, Ted— if you want to award every single student of yours an A in your classes, I won't bat an eye. If you give it, I'll know they deserved it."

For a little time they concentrated on their food. Both were abstemious eaters—a small salad for each, and then Ford had a cup of vegetable soup, a chicken sandwich on whole-grain bread, and a fruit cup, while Carroll ate a vegetarian lunch of lentils, steamed vegetables, and scalloped potatoes, followed by a bowl of cut melons, cantaloupe and honeydew.

While they ate, they discussed school concerns and needs, and then at the end of the meal, Ford said, "I know you haven't any classes scheduled until later this afternoon. Do you have a free hour to chat?"

"Certainly, Ford," Carroll said. "It's a bit early in term to have student appointments, and I put a note on my office door that I'm away at lunch. What is the subject of our chat?"

"A type of poltergeist, I think," Ford said. "But one with some disturbing elements. Ted—speaking now as Dr. Carroll, because I want your expertise and a straightforward assessment—how often does a threatening poltergeist actually resort to physical violence against people?"

Tilting his head back and tenting his fingers, Carroll said, "Interesting question. I could merely cite cases, of course, but you're as familiar with them as I am. You're asking me for a judgment call. Well, let me think. You're aware that some so-called poltergeist cases seem to be something different. The classic concept of a poltergeist is an annoying post-carnate ghost. A ghost that refuses to believe it is dead, that remains in its former habitation, and that resents living people as trespassers and intruders and tries to frighten them away. That type of poltergeist seems either incapable of doing serious harm, or else averse to doing so. Here's an obscure case from Germany, though: Are you familiar with the Leichenschauhaus occurrence in the year 1946?"

Ford repeated the name. "No, it's strange to me. I recognize the term, though—'Inquest house.' I believe that means 'morgue.'"

"Yes, it does." Carroll said. "It was in, if I recall correctly, a suburb of Mainz, I forget the name of the community. Anyway, the locale had suffered badly during the last year of the war, when an Allied bombing raid went badly off-course during bad weather and dropped its bombs there by mistake instead of on the military target thirty miles away."

"Tragic,"" Ford said.

"Indeed. It annihilated half the small community. As for the Leichenschauhaus, which was isolated, the building had been badly damaged, and following the end of the war, a group of people made enough makeshift repairs to establish a kind of communal dormitory where the morgue had stood, using just the shell of the original building. A poltergeist outbreak erupted there in the winter of 1946 January, if I recall."

"What were the manifestations?" asked Ford.

"Well, the two dozen or so men who slept there were mainly laborers—masons, glaziers, carpenters, and so on—who were struggling to rebuild the village with inadequate tools and supplies. The disturbances began as the usual knocking and pounding noises, keeping the exhausted men from their sleep. Some of them were Catholic, and they called in a priest to perform an exorcism. It failed spectacularly."

"How so?" Ford asked.

"The priest exploded."

Ford's jaw dropped. "What!"

Carroll nodded, his expression solemn. "According to the story, the priest had barely begun to pray when his body violently blew apart. There was very little left that was recognizably human. Three of the workers were killed and another dozen injured. They had been onlookers, you understand. The official explanation was that an unexploded bomb went off, but the surviving witnesses swear that the explosion came from within the poor man—as though he had swallowed a grenade, one of the injured men said. The building was immediately abandoned and later demolished and the area paved over. It is, I believe, a parking lot today. There have been no more sounds from the supposed poltergeist."

Ford adjusted his spectacles. "Supposed? It wasn't an actual poltergeist, then?"'

Carroll stroked his short beard. His voice became soft and musing. "No one knows. However, I believe it was not." He grimaced. "You see, I haven't told you the whole story. The place had a small prison during the war, and the morgue was part of that. Prison is the wrong term. It was a prisoner-of-war camp. The few hundred inmates were captured allies from France, Norway, England, and the United States who all shared only one characteristic. That all but guaranteed their death in captivity. Can you guess?"

"They were all Jewish," Ford said.

"I'm sorry, Ford," Carroll replied.

"Well—I'm not an observant member of the faith," Ford said. "Still—for someone like me, it hits hard."

"I know it does, and I'm sorry. Now, I would wager you've read the works of Peter von Bredow."

"Certainly," Ford said. "Every paranormal researcher has."

"They're classics. But if you've read every word von Bredow ever published, you've still never read his discussion of that case, for the simple reason that he never wrote it. However, I met him once in Cologne—he was quite old by then, in his nineties, but still sound of mind—and he told me the details of his investigation, which he performed a year following the priest's death. He concluded that the force behind the murders—no other term fits—was not a ghost at all, but what he called a rachegeist. It was not the soul of any individual, but rather a disembodied spirit that had never lived in a body, a type of elemental, one that was never human but that gained its existence, its power and purpose and a degree of sentience, from the formidable emotions of rage, despair, and terror. It could not or did not discriminate between good people and bad, but struck out blindly at any human within range."

Ford drew in a deep, nervous breath. "As you may suspect, I have a case in mind. And this is new territory for me."

"Fortunately, these manifestations are among the rarest," Carroll said. "Are you investigating personally?"

"No, no, it's halfway across the country, and time won't permit. I'm sending someone—well, a family member who's had some experience, but now I'm quite nervous about the prospect."

"I'll offer any help I can give," Carroll said. "I'd even offer to go myself, but—well, I made one terrible mistake ten years ago, and I swore off that kind of thing. I can pass on to you what Von Bredow told me about detecting and dealing with a rachegeist, however."

"Rachegeist," Ford said. "Spirit of revenge. How does one combat such a thing?"

"How does one fight fire?" asked Carroll, a smile quirking up his mustache.

Ford looked blank for a moment. "With . . . fire? I know the old saying, but how would that help in the case of—of—an emo-elemental?"

"I have some ideas," Carroll said.

* * *

Here is the difference between Dipper and Mabel at school:

Dipper had taken a state-wide first place in the hundred-meter dash. His teammates complimented him. But the next time he was at school, he walked the corridors and everyone around him acted as if they couldn't see him.

Mabel successfully tried out for the part of Eliza Doolittle. The next day in school, she couldn't go five steps without someone calling out, "Way to go, Mabel!" or "Gratz, girl!" Girls wanted her to tell the whole story: Had she been scared? Who was playing Higgins? Was he scrumpt? And so on and so on. Guys wanted to give her a fist-bump or even a hug. Lots of guys, lots of hugs.

Dipper didn't feel envious, exactly, but he did have a sense that the admiration was a little loaded in Mabel's favor. No matter. She had earned it.

And anyway—now the girls noticed he had _scruff! _A lot of the girls he knew only slightly paused in passing and complemented him: "Whoa, Dipper! Good look for you!" said Alma Westbrook as he walked into his calc class. And at lunch, Dewayneda (OK, her dad had wanted a son to name after himself) McCall came right up to him and caressed his cheek with a warm palm. "I love a short beard!" she told him.

Amazing. Yet—the look was temporary, and he had to admit that without the benefit of Mabel's little cosmetic stick, much of the effect would be lost.

True, he had to shave every day if he wanted to keep his face smooth, but a lot of the whiskers were so fair in color that they were hard to see without that brow-fluffer effect.

The teachers probably noticed, but they didn't comment. Unlike some other schools, Piedmont was pretty liberal on dress-code and grooming-code matters. Generally a few Senior boys tried out that kind of look, but almost always they gave it up after a week or so—they couldn't really produce a full crop yet, and their beards looked dismally patchy.

After school, Mabel drove Dipper to a hair salon (U.S. Hairforce) and hovered just behind the cosmetician as she trimmed and styled Dipper's hair. Dipper caught his reflection in the mirror—he looked a lot like he had done on the few times when he'd been Mr. Mystery, but his hair was swept back further and lay with a few natural waves. His birthmark was obvious.

He had plenty of the Pancote, though. In the car Mabel smoothed some on with her fingertips. "This stuff is amazing!" she said. "It would make a killer acne cover-up! Where'd you buy it?"

"I didn't," he admitted. "Grunkle Ford sent it to me."

"Tell him I want a steady supply!" Mabel tilted her head. "OK, Bro, a little constructive criticism?"

"Sure," he said, surprised.

"The cheeks and chin are looking promising, but keep shaving your neck, OK? Something about neck beards just shrieks 'Teen trying way too hard.'"

"I'll start shaving my neck the minute you get us home," he said.

Back home, another package awaited him: black suit, crisp white shirt, black tie, shiny shoes. All in his exact sizes.

He hung up the suit, tie looped around the hanger, and then went to the bathroom to take care of the neck stubble. He also wiped off the forehead makeup—it took a dab of Mabel's cold cream to dislodge it.

He tried on the clothes, Mabel admired them, though she did say they made him look like an apprentice mortician who catered to the Mafia. He carefully packed them for the trip the next afternoon.

Dipper did his homework, had dinner with the family, and then did his normal face-time chat with Wendy just past eight, catching her just after she finished washing the Corduroy dinner dishes.

And right away she noticed little changes. "Workin' on a new look, Dip?" she asked with a grin. "You got your hair combed back and you've showing kind of a five o'clock shadow. Not bad, man. I could get to like it."

It made him nervous, but the time had come. "It's kind of a disguise," he said. "Grunkle Ford wants me to help him with an investigation, and I have to pose as a trainee Agent to do it."

Wendy's expression immediately grew serious. And her voice sounded seriously concerned. "Dude, is this gonna be dangerous? One of those times when Ford underestimates the risk?"

"I don't think so," Dipper said. "Not as dangerous as that Holy Mackerel lodge ghost, anyway. It seems more like a poltergeist, one of those noisy, aggravating phantoms."

"Peeves, huh?" Wendy asked. She grinned as he blinked. "Come on, everybody's read those books Too bad he wasn't in the movies! Listen, I won't pry into it right now, 'cause I know Ford's got a bug about secrecy and all, but afterward, I want some details, OK?"

"You'll be the first to get them," he promised.

"Mabes going with you to investigate? Mystery Twins?"

"Not this time. It's some distance off," Dipper said.

"I'm likin' this less and less, man. Makes me nervous A.F. Nobody's got your back?"

"There'll be a regular Agent along," Dipper said.

She still looked dissatisfied. "Well—look, can I fly down and help out?"

He sighed. "Every part of me wants to say yes, but—that won't be possible, Wendy. I'm so sorry."

She shook her head. "All right, I won't argue. I'm gonna trust you to take care of yourself, though, man. What would I do if something happened to you just a month after I accepted your ring? I'd, like, turn into that Miss Havisham. Lock myself up and put a wedding cake on the table to rot!"

"I'll be extra careful," Dipper said. "I love you, Lumberjack Girl."

She gave him a melancholy, sweet smile. "Back at you, Big Dipper."


	9. Chapter 9

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 9: Wings of an Angel**

**(September 30, 2016)**

On Friday before last period, Dipper visited his locker and took out the suit, hanging in a garment bag (borrowed from his dad), plus the duffel that he would use as a light suitcase. He had packed in it not only enough clothes for two days, but also the new shoes. That, the garment bag, and his laptop were sort of a minimum for the trip, but they were also an impediment. Fortunately, Mrs. Othmar didn't insist on a seating chart, so he took a desk in the last row on the left and was able to put the stuff on the floor against the wall.

Even so, she asked, "What are you planning for after school, Dipper?"

Mabel had been right: "Have a cover story ready, Broseph!"

"I have an appointment," he explained. "I have to wear a suit."

She accepted that and went on with the lesson (AP Composition, which he hardly needed) and as far as the other students in class were concerned, at that hour on a long Friday school day, nobody cared why he'd brought the stuff in.

He was first out the door when class dismissed and like a salmon swimming along with others on spawning duty, he headed away from the bus lines and for the commuter line.

He stepped to the curb where parents pulled through to pick up mainly younger students who couldn't drive and saw a dark, striking-looking woman wearing a black pants suit and amber sunglasses and thought, "It couldn't be."

Before he could try her on the code words Ford had given him as a recognition signal ("I didn't expect this weather"), she said, "You Pines? This way. I'm your ride."

As they walked to a black, sleek car, Dipper gasped out the password. Without breaking stride, she said, "Stickler, huh? OK, 'It changes fast in the early fall.' Satisfied?"

"Uh-huh."

She popped the trunk with a press of a key fob, he hastily put his luggage in, and then she held the passenger door open for him. "Thanks." He climbed in and fastened his seat belt.

She got behind the wheel. "Hang on. We have to burn."

They pushed the speed limit all the way. She was a demon at the wheel, weaving to the best spots, finding holes in the traffic that he couldn't have seen, and pulling up at the airport in what seemed to Dipper an impossibly short time.

"You're a great driver," he said.

"Uh-huh," she replied.

They parked in short-term and then she said, "Jump out and get your stuff. We have to hustle. Let me go first."

"Uh, yes, Miss."

She didn't offer to carry anything, but led him through the airport in her fast, long-legged stride. When he started to get in the TSA line, she jerked her head and said, "Not that way, kid. Follow me. We have advance clearance."

They breezed through without having to take off shoes or belts or run the laptop and luggage through X-ray. She led him to a section set aside for private aircraft, then down a stair, out onto the tarmac, and to a waiting mid-sized jet with a ladder already pulled up to the hatch.

She pulled a ground-crew leader over and asked, "OK to go?"

He gave her a thumbs-up.

"Up the ladder, Pines!"

It was a struggle with his burdens. She came up right behind him. He paused at the top.

She said, "Head's right in front of you. If you're prone to airsickness, take one of the forward-facing seats. Doesn't matter which one."

He had six seats in all to choose from—the forward two faced backward, the other four faced forward. All of them were exceedingly plush, leather-upholstered and immaculate, unlike the airline seats he was sort of used to. He took the second on the right side of the narrow aisle. "Uh, there's no overhead bin—"

"I'll take care of this." She hauled his garment bag and duffel to the back and stowed it somewhere, leaving him with the laptop. Then she came forward again. "Listen good, because we're on the clock. I showed you where the potty is, the galley's in the stern, soft drinks in the fridge, snacks in the pantry over the fridge. Take whatever you want. No flight-attendant service, so you'll clean up after yourself. It should be about a three-hour flight to Minnesota, because we'll have a good tailwind. You need anything, just press this button on the armrest and that opens the mike and speaker to the cockpit. Agent Barnes is pilot, I'm co-pilot, so if we don't hit turbulence or anything, I'll come back and talk with you about the setup. Questions?"

"Uh—what do I call you?" Dipper asked.

"Agent Hazard. Field Agent First Grade. What are you?"

"Uh, well, Agent Second Grade M.A. Pines."

She gave him a deadpan stare. "Do you even know what that is?"

He shook his head.

"Trainee. Next step would be first class, and that's probationary. Officially, we just call each other Agent, but I've had six years in the outfit, so I'm your superior. Remember that."

He nodded.

"Fasten your seatbelt. This will happen fast."

She went forward to the cabin. Dipper heard sounds outside the plane—the same sort he heard on bigger ones, but these were much louder, the closing of hatches, the growling of motors, the closing of the forward door. Then the plane backed out of the dock, turning as it did, and headed for a runway.

The speaker came to life: "Pilot Barnes here. We're second in line for take-off. Be sure your belt's fastened and the seat's upright."

Being Dipper, he double-checked.

Within minutes, the private jet revved its engines and then roared down the runway, taking off in a very short run. It tilted back so sharply that Dipper had the momentary sensation of being in a rocket. It climbed rapidly through a thin layer of cloud, gaining altitude so fast his ears popped painfully. And still it rose, the sky becoming a richer, darker blue.

At last it leveled off, and the intercom came on again: "We're at 42,000 feet, and we've got a strong tail wind at approximately 165 knots. We should be in Rochester well ahead of schedule. Looks like smooth flying, so you can unfasten your belt and move around the cabin if you want. As long as you remain seated, keep the belt buckled."

A moment later, Agent Hazard came back and sat opposite him in the backward-facing seat, not bothering with her seat belt. "Pines," she said, her brown eyes inspecting him. "Any relation?"

"Stanford Pines is my great-uncle," he said.

"I wondered."

She sat sizing him up. She was an attractive woman in her twenties, short black hair, a complexion like café-au-lait, and those direct brown eyes. "You look like you have some questions."

He shrugged. "Well—this is my first time."

She didn't smile. "I wondered about that. No investigatory experience."

"No, no, I have that," Dipper said. "I've fought ghosts and other paranormal things before. Sometimes with Gr—my Uncle Stanford, I mean. This looks like a routine exorcism. Uh—may I ask a question?"

"Sure," she said. "I don't promise to answer them."

"Is Hazard your real name?" When she raised an eyebrow, he added, "I've met Deputy Director Powers and Agent Trigger, and the agents' names seem—"

"Do you know what the term nom de guerre means?"

"A pseudonym," Dipper said. "Like, uh, his soldiers called Andrew Jackson 'Old Hickory.'"

"Most of us who make this work a career assume an Agency name," she said. "One little way that we help keep our civilian families safe."

"Oh."

"All right," she said. "I'm Agent Hazard, as far as you're concerned. I'm not going to come along to hold your hand on this investigation, but I'll be responsible for on-site supervision, Agency liaison, and post-mission wrap-up. Let me brief you on what I know, and you check me if there's something I should know but don't."

She went through a quick, but thorough, summary of the case, with Dipper nodding. She knew everything—she even mentioned Dipper's and Eloise's encounter with a lich at the Westminster House. When she finished, he said, "I think you've got everything."

She smiled. "Is that a compliment on my professionalism, or are you hitting on me?"

Dipper's mouth didn't make words right for a second: "Proo—professornal—I mean, you're good at your job."

She nodded, accepting the compliment. "All right. You may do. I'll have to check you out when you're dressed for the part, but I think you just may do. You practiced a less adolescent voice?"

"Uh, my sister Mabel's an actress, and she advised me to talk like this." He cleared his throat, and then in his low, husky key, he said, "We in the Agency have no sense of humor that we're aware of."

She stared at him for a long moment and then said, "You little bastard." But then she laughed. "I think you'll do, after all, Mr. Pines. Or do you already have a nom de guerre?"

"Dipper," he said. "You can just call me Dipper."

* * *

As Barnes had predicted, the jet made exceptional time, and they beat the ETA of 10:30 into Rochester by nearly twenty minutes. The terminal was shaped sort of like a capital A, except with the point taken off. They left the plane at the base of the right leg and hurried into the terminal, down the Susan B. Anthony concourse, past Security, and out the door into a cool night to the valet pick-up and drop-off area.

This time Agent Hazard helpfully carried the duffel, so Dipper kept up with her with a little less effort. A nondescript four-year-old car, a gray Cambric, glided up to the curb and a short man stepped out and opened the passenger door. To Hazard, he said, "The nights are getting longer."

"Oh, shut up, Taylor," she said. "But just for the record, 'That's good for astronomers.' Got the keys?"

"Here you go," he said, handing two sets over. "Any orders?"

"Barnes will join you here and then you're off-duty until you get called."

"Thanks!"

"Oh, the password is 'Would you like to buy an elk,' and the countersign is 'What the hell are you talking about?'"

Taylor chuckled and went inside the terminal. Hazard got behind the wheel. "I take it back about the sense of humor," Dipper told her.

"You think the sign and countersign thing was a joke?"

"Sounded like it."

"Why didn't you laugh, then?"

"I'm practicing not having a sense of humor, ma'am."

_She _laughed then. "Kid, I think I could get to like you." They pulled away from the curb, and she said, "Give me directions for the Gopher Inn, Winnemunka."

Dipper began, "I don't know—"

But then the GPS interrupted him: "Route ready. Exit the airport and turn right on Leqve Drive." An illuminated map came to life on the console, with a little blue arrow representing their car.

It directed them to Highway 63 and then north into the countryside. Dipper looked out over a dark, flat landscape. No moon was visible. The climate felt a good deal cooler there than it had been in Piedmont—the high that day had been close to 90, and here the display above the GPS screen said the temperature was 58. Hazard seemed to read his mind. "Want the heater on?"

"If you do," he said.

She switched it on and soon the air warmed comfortably. Traffic was intermittently moderate to light to non-existent. It was hard to tell, but the countryside looked to Dipper like farmlands, with isolated houses, sometimes a barn with a mercury-vapor light in the barnyard. Other times, just long stretches of darkness and what might be pastures or fields of corn.

Finally, after a forty-minute drive, Dipper saw the green-and-white city limit sign: WINNEMUNKA MN / POPULATION 8150. Not a mile from there on the left was the Gopher Inn, its white, blue-and-red-lettered sign held up by two lumpish brown things that probably were meant to be fiberglass gophers, and jut past that he saw Sven's Pancake Palace, with a faux front of turrets and towers. "That's it," Dipper said.

Hazard parked in front of the lobby and said, "You sit tight. I'll check us in." She was in and out in five minutes and then moved the car around one wing of the motel across to to the end of the wing facing away from the highway. "These rooms are probably quieter," she said.

She popped the trunk and he collected his stuff. She took out her own suitcase, which must have been waiting for her—she had not taken it off the plane, Dipper knew. She gave him the card key for Unit 120, on the very end, and she took the one for 118, next door.

He unlocked the door, took his stuff in, and sat on the foot of the bed. The kindest thing he could think to say about the room was that it looked clean and cozy: queen-sized bed with a thick rusty-red comforter, drab orange-brown carpet, a little closet with a small safe on the top shelf, an entertainment center with a flat-screen TV and next to it a one-cup coffee maker, a small fridge underneath, a table with one chair, and a bathroom. Generic paintings on the wall, farm scenes and autumn trees. It smelled like Pine-Sol.

Dipper visited the bathroom briefly and then sat on the foot of the bed and took out his phone to call Wendy. Before he could dial, someone knocked on the door and said, "Hazard. Open up."

He did, and she popped in past him, holding up what looked like an oversized cell phone, but she used it to scan the room as she said, "This'll just take a minute, and then I'll get out of your hair. No bugs of the electronic kind, anyhow." She put away the scanner. "OK, kid, I'm gonna make sure the door locks on my way out. Bolt and chain on after I go, OK?"

"Uh—what about dinner?"

"Are you asking me on a date?"

"No! Uh, no, but—well, I haven't had anything since lunch—"

She took out her phone. "You do burgers?"

"Uh—sure," he said.

"How many?"

"One. Just one."

"Fries?"

"O-OK."

She made a brief call. "All right, in twenty minutes you'll get a delivery. It's paid for, so just accept it and enjoy it and be sure to close and lock that door after it comes, OK?"

He nodded. "Should I have it checked for poison?" he asked.

She finally smiled and shook her head. "You are a real joker, you know that? No, it's just a fast-food place that delivers, that's all. If you get stomach cramps or projectile vomiting or agonizing pain, just pound on the connecting door and I'll come in and give you a universal antidote."

"A bezoar," he said. "They're rare."

"You want me to stay here and nursemaid you until the food comes?"

"No, that's all right. I'm going to call my girlfr—my fiancée."

"Joking again?"

"No, Agent Hazard. It's for real."

"OK, maybe you're more mature than I thought. I'll let you take care of business, then. Enjoy the burger, and then sleep tight. Oh, nearly forgot, here's your set of car keys. You'll need them tomorrow."

"How about you?" he asked. "What if you need a car?"

She shrugged. "Agency dropped another one off before we got here. It's parked right next to the one we took. You didn't notice? Well, they're identical, so make sure you try to unlock the right one tomorrow morning. You put a key in the wrong one, it'll taze you."

She smiled and closed the door, then rattled the knob, and before calling Wendy, he sat there wondering if that was an Agent's idea of a joke.


	10. Chapter 10

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 10: Converging Lines**

**(September 30-October 1, 2016)**

Amy Joy Hardesty, nowadays generally known as Agent A.J. Hazard, had told Dipper the absolute truth: She had scanned both motel rooms and found no bugs, no listening devices, nothing to make her suspicious that someone was listening in.

Not that she had expected to find anything. In six years, she'd never once found one, but then the other intelligence services, the ones that might want to snoop on the Agency's business, ignored them—they were off to the side, with their own budget that did not depend on appropriations but was completely off the books. They technically reported directly to the President, but no one remembered the last time a Director had in fact done that. The general rule was "If the world is not in imminent danger of ending, the President doesn't have to know."

The former Director—no one seemed to know his name, but everyone called him the Professor—had reined in some of the, um, enthusiasm that tends to arise in groups like theirs. The new man, who didn't mind if people knew him as Dr. Pines, was continuing that effort. Agent Hazard appreciated that and understood why she, normally operating out of central California, had been detached to accompany young Agent Dipper to Minnesota.

The Midwest section, with enthusiastic but unruly agents like Trigger essentially running their own cowboy operations, still needed to be brought back into line. She approved of the new Director's determination to do just that.

However, though Agent Hazard had not _found_ any listening devices, that was not to say she had not _planted _any. In fact, she had left an unobtrusive little postcard on the desk in Dipper's room, "Places of Worship in East Chestnut County." It was as dull-looking as possible, no photos, no art, just a list of churches. And it was not made of paper, but of a very sophisticated printed circuit sandwiched in between the two printed layers. It could pick up any voice anywhere in the unit. More, another component could isolate a cell-phone signal and with luck could amplify it as well.

As Agent Hazard waited for the delivery guy to bring the burgers—he would bring hers first, so she'd have a chance to check him out for any hint of something off about him—she donned a pair of earbuds and comfortably listened in on Dipper's conversation with someone named Wendy. Son of a gun, the kid had been telling the truth about being engaged—she began by asking, "What's up for the weekend, fiancé?" She had an interesting voice, kind of laid-back and gliding, with an edge of humor.

Like all Agents, Hazard was a suspicious so-and-so. But listening closely, she got no whiff of code words or underlying secret meanings. Unless the puzzling mention of gnomes meant something, but she supposed that was, at most, a reference to some kind of teen gang up in Oregon. Might be worth a quick check, though, after this poltergeist business was cleared.

The two young lovers got a bit mushy, but Hazard heard the conversation through. Then Agent Dipper called his sister Mabel. Hmm, something seemed a little off there. He asked her, "How's it going, Eliza?"

And she answered him in a convincing British accent.

How could one twin be American, one British? Unless they were separated at birth? She made a note to ask for permission to examine the siblings' family background.

That conversation was short, and in the end, Agent Hazard was left with the impression that the twins, Mabel and Agent Dipper, were of different temperaments.

As soon as Dipper ended his call, a knock came at Hazard's door. Agent Hazard used the peephole and saw a delivery guy, a teen, shifting from foot to foot. She opened the door, accepted both meals, and tipped the boy.

He was surly, and though the tip had been generous, he didn't thank her. He got in the delivery car, backed out, and took off. She did a quick scan of the food with the harmful substances detector, found nothing worse than the usual hamburger levels of fat and salt, and took Dipper's burger next door, along with a canned soft drink she'd removed from the prepacked suitcase the Agency had delivered to her.

She knocked, he opened the door. "Did you check through the peephole?" she asked.

He looked confused. He'd removed his shoes and stood there in sock feet. "Uh, no."

"_Always _check. And even if you see it's me, ask, 'Who is it?' That's a rule. Here you go. I never heard of this brand of soda."

"Pitt's!" Dipper said, sounding pleasantly surprised. "It's only available in Oregon!"

She smiled at his childlike enthusiasm. "Then I guess somebody in Oregon's watching out for you. What time are you meeting the contact at the restaurant tomorrow?"

"Eight," he said.

"Need a wake-up call?"

He shook his head. "I've already set the alarm on my phone for seven."

"You driving to pick her up?"

"No, she said she'll ride her bike."

"OK, then, see you tomorrow. Enjoy the burger."

_Damn, a bicycle. One more detail somebody had overlooked._ Agent Hazard went back to her room, made a quick phone call, and then discovered that the burger and fries were at least still acceptably warm. She hardly noticed the taste—she'd had far too many fast-food meals while on stake-outs.

* * *

In his room, Dipper ate the burger and fries—not bad at all, pretty tasty, in fact—and drank the room-temperature Pitt's, the peachy taste taking him right back to the Falls. That done, he took a warm shower—airplane travel always left him feeling slightly greasy—brushed his teeth, inspected his stubble in the mirror, and put on his stupid pajamas (Mom had insisted he take them, and having read horror stories about bedbugs in motels, he thought they might be a good idea), and went to bed.

By then it was nearly midnight, though by his internal clock it was still only about ten, Pacific time. He didn't feel all that sleepy, but after deciding that he needed the rest, he used the autosuggestion techniques he'd learned to slip down into a sort of twilight state—if not the Mindscape, at least into a dreamscape.

He had a mild nightmare of himself and Eloise, both of them twelve again, lost in the endlessly multiplying, infinitely branching hallway of the Westminster House as it tried with determination to kill them. They couldn't find their way out, and as they fled, breathless and with hearts ready to burst, they heard behind them _something_ pursuing them.

"Don't let go!" she begged, clutching his hand so hard it hurt.

The dream petered out with them still running and desperate and nothing bad happening, no Big Bad bursting in to attack them. More frustration than terror, in the end.

That's the trouble with dreams. The plots tend to be lousy.

* * *

At seven, the phone chimed and he threw back the covers and rolled out of bed, momentarily disoriented. Oh, yeah, he wasn't in the Shack or in his room in Piedmont, but way out in the countryside of Winnemunka, Minnesota.

He stretched, took another shower, washing his hair with the tiny bottle of shampoo/conditioner thoughtfully provided by the Gopher Inn, and then, feeling foolish, broke out the eyebrow fluffer and touched up both brows and stubble. "I look dumb," he told his reflection. He used the motel hair dryer and his comb to arrange his coiffure, as Mabel called it, in her approved style.

Then into the suit. He'd found a buffing cloth for shoes in the pack of toiletries left for him in the bathroom, and he gave the black shoes a little polish. They gleamed already, a lot shinier and nicer than any other shoes he owned. And they were comfortable, as if made specially for him, which for all he knew they might have been—the Agency was full of quirky touches.

He carefully re-combed his hair and used the makeup to cover his birthmark. And, oh, yes, the black-rimmed spectacles. He put them on and checked himself out in the mirror.

OK, not too shabby. He told his reflection, "We in the Agency are older than we look." And then he got a fit of the giggles. Mabel was the actor in the family, not him!

Dad had advised him to leave a tip for the maid—though his dad thought he and Ford would be staying in a motel either in northern California or southwestern Oregon, not all the way out here in Minnesota—and Dipper left a five-dollar bill where Dad had told him: "On the pillow, not on the desk or the bathroom counter. If it's on the pillow, the maid will know it's for her, not just a bill you forgot. Don't make her feel like a thief."

There you go, nameless maid. Thanks for tidying up.

Taking his laptop and the compact kit of anomaly detector, goggles, and anti-poltergeist materials, he ventured outside. It was warmer than he'd thought it would be, with a sky streaked with some faint high cirrus clouds. The sun was up, and he saw trees with autumnal colors already showing.

Huh. Only one car, so that must be his. He did a walk-around and stopped behind the car, surprised: a bike rack had been added. He was sure it hadn't been there when they took their luggage out. He popped the trunk with his key fob, and despite the rack, it opened. He stowed the ghost kit and laptop there and slammed the lid. Very sophisticated bike rack, probably specially made, he decided.

Preparing to be tazed, he put the key in the driver's door lock, realizing a second too late that he could have unlocked it with the fob.

No matter, he didn't get shocked. He checked his inner jacket pocket for the credentials—yep, there was the trifold—and then started the engine. The car failed to explode, which he took as a good sign.

He carefully backed out of the slot, drove around to the front of the motel, and realized that the Gopher Inn parking lot directly adjoined that for Sven's Pancake Palace and that, in fact, he could simply cross over without having to go into the street. Feeling a little foolish, he parked in the restaurant lot after having driven maybe one twentieth of a mile.

He carefully locked the car and went inside Sven's Pancake Palace.

The restaurant smelled of yeast, maple syrup, and breakfast. It was overall a sweet aroma. Mabel would have loved it. A crowd of people were chowing down on pancakes, waffles, and other dishes, while chattering cheerfully. Many of them looked dressed for a day's work, others for a relaxing Saturday in casual clothes.

He looked around the dining room and saw Agent Hazard alone in a small booth for two, looking like an immaculately groomed businesswoman. She caught his gaze and subtly shook her head.

A hostess, wearing a cheesy uniform—frilly, starchy pink skirt, white blouse, and a tiara—greeted him and chirped, "Table for one, sir?"

"I'm—" Dipper stifled a cough and then tried again in his gruff, whispery voice: "I'm meeting someone, thanks. I'll wait here if you don't mind."

"Two for breakfast, then?"

"Two, yes."

He stood in the small foyer, looking out and checking the time. It was nearly eight, and he wondered if Eloise would be—oh. There she was, having emerged from a side street and waiting to cross the highway.

Taking advantage of a break in traffic, she came biking into the lot, reminding Dipper of how Wendy, at fifteen, had ridden her bike. Both girls wore helmets, and both helmets were unadorned with flowers or other girly stuff. He grinned.

Eloise prudently chained her bike to a newspaper box, then came toward the door, taking off her helmet and shaking out her light brown hair. He opened the door for her, and she came in past him, muttering, "Thanks." He followed her as she went inside and stood looking around the tables.

"Uh—Eloise, I'm right here," he said, forgetting his raspy voice.

She spun and gaped at him with round blue eyes. "Dipper! Oh, my God, I didn't—you look so different! You've got a beard!"

"Just a disguise," he said.

"I like it. Makes you look . . . kinda _dangerous_," she said with a grin. She reached for his hand. "It's so good to see you again."

"You too," he said.

"Oh—" she hugged him tightly, her soft breasts against his chest. "Thanks so much for coming! Now I'm not scared anymore."

He gently disengaged. "I hope I can help. Uh, here's the waitress."

Eloise blushed a little.

The same hostess carried a couple of big menus. "Is this the whole party?" she asked.

"Yes. Table for two, please," Dipper said, making Eloise glance at him as he slipped back into the low voice.

"Is a booth OK?"

"Fine," Eloise said.

"This way, please." The waitress led them to a small booth directly behind Agent Hazard, and Dipper supposed that had been pre-arranged. She could listen in without being obvious.

They got settled, the waitress asked what they wanted to drink, and Dipper nodded to Eloise. She said, "Coffee, please, and cream."

"Same for me, thanks," Dipper said. He tilted his head. "You've changed, too. You look great, Eloise."

She shrugged. "Well, a lot of it's makeup."

He shook his head, smiling. "Most of it's you, and it's all beautiful. OK, for now let's forget about exorcisms and ghosts and stuff. Let's just have breakfast. What's good here?"

"I've never had anything bad here," she said.

Dipper hoped that was an omen, not only for breakfast, but for the investigation to come.


	11. Chapter 11

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 11: What We're Up Against**

**(October 1, 2016)**

Amos Verence Beeton was a certifiable lunatic. Indeed, his concerned family moved to commit him to the infamous Murfield Insane Asylum in the fall of 1859, when Amos was fifty-one years old. They might have done it, too—three doctors, one of whom was later to gain some fame as an alienist, a specialist in mental disorders, stood ready to declare him hopelessly and permanently deranged.

A friend of his stepped in and offered an alternative, one that Beeton's two sisters could not bring themselves to refuse. Murfield was already notorious. Those who went there seldom survived very long, not succumbing to mistreatment, but rather to despair. The friend, Fr. Francis Fratelli, a priest, said he could arrange for Mr. Beeton to be housed in the St. Genesius Monastery in eastern Pennsylvania, a Cistercian retreat where fifty monks followed the Rule of St. Benedict.

As a work of charity, they would care for poor Amos. He would be among silent, helpful men who would pray for him and help him as much as they could. He would pose no danger to himself or to others. Though the Beetons were not Catholic, they agreed, and the move was made, fortunately for Amos, for in 1863, a fire of unknown origin broke out in the Murfield Asylum and burned it to the ground. Not one of the fifty inmates survived.

Amos, on the other hand, lived to the venerable age of 93, dying peacefully in 1901. And he recovered his composure and his mental balance and wrote his last work there.

To begin at the beginning, Amos was born in the year 1808. The Beetons of Boston were a wealthy family, making their money from shipping and then publishing and finally railroads. Amos was always a dreamy, impractical lad, and his father said he'd better be a teacher because he would never amount to much as a businessman. His cousins took over the business, though he was always well-provided for.

He had a quick, imaginative mind, and in 1830 he graduated from Harvard with a distinguished record. For lack of a more precise field, he earned a degree in Divinity, but his real interest lay in Philosophy. With his independent income, shortly after graduation he traveled to England, where he earned a second degree from Cambridge University in 1834. He had developed a strong interest in the arcane and the invisible, and following his graduation from Cambridge, he spent nearly ten years traveling widely in Europe, the Holy Land, and into Asia, exploring odd superstitions, beliefs in supernatural—but not necessarily religious—powers, and even investigating reports of ghosts and hauntings.

In 1844 he settled for a time in Paris and there wrote his first four books, which attempted to establish a philosophical basis for paranormal research. His thesis, briefly, was that such things as ghosts and poltergeists (he did not use that term, but called them "mindless malignant spirits") were evidence of a plane of existence that most humans are completely unaware of.

He called it the World Beyond the World and posited it as a world coexistent with ours and overlying the physical. It could, under certain conditions, interact with the material world. In fact, everyone is at all times surrounded by "invisible and impalpable intelligences" (Amos was partial to alliteration) of which we are normally unaware until some disturbance in the energies of our world or the World Beyond makes it possible for these intelligences to manifest and interfere with our reality.

His first book, _A World Beyond the World, _was a three-hundred-page manuscript that laid the foundation of his theory. No one would publish it. He wrote three more books, each one exploring some facet of his theory—ghosts and hauntings, inexplicable disappearances, and the like—in great detail. Academic publishers rejected them all. No commercial editors cared to read them.

Disappointed, Amos returned home in the year 1851, when his father died. He still was no hand at business, and he soon arranged with his cousins to sell them his interest in the Beetons' enterprises under an arrangement by which he was guaranteed a comfortable income for life. He was by no means a recluse; he met and became friends with Thoreau and Emerson in this period, and they did not find his notions so odd.

He could already foresee the coming of the American Civil War. A fervent believer in liberty, he became a notable journalist in the Abolitionist cause. His only commercially published works were pamphlets arguing for the abolition of slavery on philosophical and moral grounds, for which he refused payment. Eventually, he arranged with his uncle Mitford Beeton to privately publish his first four philosophical books in very limited editions—only 250 copies of each title were printed.

In 1857, people began regarding him as eccentric. A savage, unsigned review of _A World Beyond the World_ appeared in the March number of _An American Review._ The reviewer's words were less than kind, and the piece ended:

* * *

It is a pity that Mr. Beeton's friends, if he has any and family, if any claim him, do not have him declared incompetent and put safely away. He prates of spirits and ghosts, and this in our time! Why, Mr. Beeton, we do not dwell in the Age of Superstition, but in the Nineteenth Century! We live in the Era of Steam, the Era of the Electric Telegraph, the Era of the Railroad! Science, not Superstition, is our lodestar!

What, are we to walk trembling down the streets of our cities, fearful of an imaginary ghostly attacker creeping close behind? Are we to frighten ourselves with bogey-tales, like children? To suggest such is to rant like a man with mind unhinged; and so we say, off with the author to an Asylum, and the sooner, the better!

* * *

However, one sympathetic reader of all four books was Father Fratelli, who sought out Amos and befriended him. Fratelli had a problem—an apparent haunting (it would be called a poltergeist today) that resisted exorcism. Amos, eager to test his theory, agreed to do what he could to help the family afflicted with the haunting.

What happened is unclear, but it shattered Amos's nerves and made him so incoherent that his sisters decided to commit him. Only Fratelli's kind intervention made it possible for him to find refuge with the monks instead of being chained to a bed in a hellhole that masqueraded as a place of treatment.

Amos's mind gradually cleared. He converted to Catholicism in 1867. He never took Holy Orders or became a priest, but the brothers in the monastery thought that, had he only the vocation, he would have made a fine one. He did begin to write again. He composed his final book, a detailed explanation of his theories and of how such things as Elementals—unbodied, malignant spirits—might be dealt with.

He called the work _The Myriad Masks of Evil. _It ran to almost five hundred pages in his small, clear handwriting. He completed it before his eightieth birthday but never tried to have it published, even privately. After his death, the monks offered the manuscript to his family, now descendants of his cousins, who continued to be businessmen in railroads, banks, and publishing. They declined, and the handwritten work remained in the monastery.

In 1929 a scholar from New Jersey, a researcher specializing in the religious history of America came to the monastery and remained there for two months. He discovered the manuscript and asked if he might copy it. Instead, the monks gave it to him. That scholar passed away in 1947, and he willed his books and papers to the small college where he wound up as a teacher: Backuspmore College it was at that time.

The manuscript was bound and shelved in Special Collections. No one ever checked it out or read it.

Until a freshman at Backupsmore University, as it had become, who worked in the library part-time, stumbled across it. Young Stanford Pines noted that the paper and ink were deteriorating and offered to transcribe the work into type. The genial special-collections librarian hired him to do that. Though Ford was not a trained typist, he had taught himself to type with accuracy and speed using four fingers.

Still, his studies occupied most of his time, and only at odd moments could he work on typing out a copy of the old manuscript, three to five pages at a sitting. It took him seven months, and then the library had the typescript bound and placed in Special Collections beside the brittle handwritten original.

No one ever checked either out.

Late in September 2016, Ford called the current librarian in the Special Collections office and asked if the copy were still there. The librarian checked and told him that in the 1980s the typed copy had been duplicated on microfiche. In the 1990s, all the microfiche holdings had been digitized. In fact, if Stanford wanted, he could get a .pdf copy of the work for a nominal fee. Ford paid it with a credit card, and the librarian emailed the copy.

Ford received it late in the afternoon of September 30. He stayed up all night reading it and searching for the sections he could only vaguely recall.

At 10:00 a.m. on October 1, thoroughly alarmed, he picked up the phone to call Dipper—but then, not wanting to frighten his great-nephew, he called Agent Hazard instead. He had an urgent warning.

* * *

At the moment Ford was calling, Dipper and Eloise sat in their booth at Sven's Pancake Palace having breakfast—a fluffy waffle topped with strawberries and whipped cream and a side of Canadian bacon for Eloise, a goat-cheese-and-avocado omelet and whole-wheat toast for Dipper. Dipper heard Agent Hazard's phone ring behind him, but he was not nosy enough to eavesdrop.

For her part, Agent Hazard said softly, "Yes, sir, he's right behind me. Do you want to—yes, I can do that. No, not alone, he's with the informant. I'll try to find a time to speak to him. Yes, sir, I understand. I'll keep a close watch on him."

She ordered another cup of coffee, though she didn't want it, as an excuse to linger. At about 8:30, the two young people finished their breakfast. Eloise went to the ladies' room, and as soon as she was away from the table, Agent Hazard turned around.

"Dipper. I've had word from the Director."

Dipper started to turn around, but she said, "Don't look at me, and keep your voice quiet. You can understand me, can't you?"

"Sure," he said. "You heard from Grunkle Ford?"

"I . . . don't know what that means," she said. "Listen, the Director has some instructions that you have to read before approaching this thing. He'll email a document to you. Wait until that comes through on your phone before you try anything. You understand?"

"Yes."

"It's an order."

"I understand," he said.

"I won't be far away."

Fighting the urge to turn and face the agent, Dipper said, "Listen, the principal's supposed to meet us there in a few minutes—"

"Stall him. Here comes the informant."

Eloise sat back down and said, "I guess we should head out."

"Guess so," Dipper said. "Just to be clear, how do we get there?"

"Just turn left out of the parking lot," she said. "It's not very far."

"How far exactly?" he asked.

"I don't know, six miles, maybe. On the far side of town."

"And it's East Chestnut County High, right?"

She frowned at him. "Is something wrong?"

"No, I just want to be sure," he said. "East Chestnut County High, about six miles north of here, past the town."

He looked at the bill and put some cash on the table, allowing for a nice tip. "I'll ride my bike there and meet you," Eloise said, standing up.

"That won't be necessary," he said, smiling as they walked past Agent Hazard, who ignored them. "A good Agent comes equipped."

* * *

Mounting the bike on the carrier proved a little tricky, but the two of them figured it out. Then Dipper got behind the wheel and started off, waiting for a clear moment of traffic before turning onto the highway and then driving carefully for the school, under the speed limit. "If this takes a while, are your parents going to get worried?" he asked.

"Not today," she said. "We lucked out. My Dad is off for a bank consultation way up in Thief River Falls—don't laugh, it's a real place! It's such a long drive that he's going to stay overnight and he won't be back until tomorrow. Mom's going to go shopping up in St. Paul. She may be on the way there already. Anyway, she won't be back before late afternoon. She wanted me to go with her, but I begged off because of too much homework. She thinks I'm meeting Clarisse Kotchner for a study day. Clarisse will cover for me. If Mom calls her to check, she'll say I'm in the bathroom and then call me so I can return—what is it?"

"Devious," Dipper said with a chuckle. "My sister would be proud of you."

He drove for a few minutes in silence, but Eloise kept gazing at him. "What?" he asked.

"You just—you turned out kind of handsome," she said, smiling. She touched his arm lightly. "I mean it. The glasses suit you, and your beard makes you look so mature."

"It doesn't really qualify as a beard," he said. "And the glasses are fakes, just clear plastic lenses."

Abruptly, she asked, "So how's your love life?"

He took a deep breath. "Eloise, I met a wonderful girl up in Gravity Falls and we fell in love. We got engaged last August. We'll get married when I'm eighteen."

"Oh. Just my luck." She tried to sound casual and light, but he could tell she was a little upset.

"I'm sorry you're having a rough time," he said.

She almost growled, "It's Jason Funderburk who's giving me a rough time. Or was. We broke up for good, and we won't get back together. He can be fun, and he can make me laugh, but—he falls in love too often and with too damn many girls at once. He's such a jerk!"

The word took Dipper back to a road trip he'd gone on in an RV with Grunkle Stan, Mabel, and Mabel's friends Grenda and Candy. What had Grunkle Stan told him about appealing to girls? He remembered it word for word: "Listen to me, kid. When it comes to girls, always be confident. And be funny, but not too funny. And be kinda annoying but in a lovable way." Dipper had objected that Stan made it sound like he had to be a jerk—and Stan agreed. Girls loved bad boys, he said.

Dipper had tried out that approach with a nice girl he just randomly met—what was her name? Emma! He'd pretended to drop her phone, and when Emma told him he was bad, he admitted it and even boasted that he was kind of a jerk.

And Emma promptly gave him her email address!

"Listen, Eloise," he said seriously, "please don't fall for the jerks. They don't deserve you. You're smart and beautiful, so wait for a good guy who'll treat you right. Fall in love with him. You'll make him a really lucky man."

"Pickings are lean at school," she said, again just failing to hit the light tone he thought she intended.

He said, "So wait for college. It's not so far away."

"You're right. It's not far away at all," she said with a puzzling smile. "There's the school, on the left."

He made the turn. The high school was a long, low, white-brick building with a flat roof—odd to see that here in snow country, he thought—and high windows, wider than they were tall. Two wings stretched out from the porticoed entrance. "Park right in front," Eloise advised. "It's the teacher's parking area, but nobody will mind."

He did. The wind had picked up, and he watched the white birches bend and the red oaks thrash, losing leaves. For a minute the two just sat there, looking out past the school at the whirl of autumn colors. "What's her name?" Eloise asked softly.

"Wendy. Wendy Corduroy," Dipper said. "She's tall, with long red hair and green eyes. I'm lucky she'd even look at me twice, let alone fall in love with me."

"Lucky Wendy," Eloise corrected.

Squirming a little, Dipper changed the subject: "Your school's bigger than I thought it would be."

"Yeah," she said. "It started out as Chestnut County High, with over a thousand students. But the west side of the county's had a lot of growth, and about fifteen years ago they opened West Chestnut High. It took most of the students. We've got about three hundred and ninety now. A lot of the rooms in the B wing—over to the right—are just used as art rooms and music rooms and club rooms now. I see Mr. Kamfer's Ford on the road. He'll be here in a second."

The Ford made the turn past the school sign, and Dipper saw another car, identical to the one he drove, pass by a second later. He barely made out Agent Hazard at the wheel. She was driving slowly, and he guessed she'd pull off somewhere not far away.

As the Ford parked a few spaces over, Dipper opened the driver's door against a buffet of wind. "Guess it's time to go and see what we're up against," he said.


	12. Chapter 12

** Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 12: Into the Unknown**

**(October 1, 2016)**

* * *

Ah, high school days. The best years of a young person's life. It's like a wonderful TV move, a musical full of romance, fun, and—

Who are we kidding here?

* * *

"More like a teen horror movie! High school is the worst. Classes get super hard, your body just flat out turns against you, and worst of all, everybody hates you!"—Wendy Corduroy

"High school sucked . . . . whoever said these were supposed to be the best years of your life was probably drunk or delusional."—Kami Garcia

"High School. Society's bright idea to put all their aggressive, naive youth into one environment to torment and emotionally scar each other for life."—Chris Colfer

"It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person's life. How anyone can come through that time well-adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle."— E.A. Bucchianeri

* * *

They met in front of the high-school doors.

Mr. Omar Kamfer was only a little taller than Dipper, a thin, bald man of forty-five or so, with pinched features and a worried expression. He wore a beige turtleneck under a tan jacket, khakis, and brown moccasins. Overall, he projected an image that might be called beige in color and in temperament.

Dipper introduced himself as M.A. Pines—he had forgotten to caution Eloise not to call him "Dipper" but hoped she'd pick up on that—and without blinking an eye at Dipper's youth, Kamfer shook his hand. "If you could resolve this issue, I'll be personally grateful," he said. "Uh, I understand there's to be no, uh—?"

"No charge, Mr. Kamfer," Dipper said. "The Agency takes on cases like this as research opportunities. I understand that Miss Niedermeyer here knows some of the people who witnessed the phenomena?"

Eloise nodded. "Yes, Agent Pines, I do. I can show you where they happened."

"Then if Mr. Kamfer will unlock the doors, we can begin."

Kamfer did, and Dipper noticed how he looked around apprehensively as they stepped inside and he turned on the lights. The lobby had a worn tile floor in a gray marble pattern, with black entry rugs inside the doors to catch some of the dirt. The wall opposite the doors held a big round electric clock, surrounded by a red neon ring, picturing a swooping eagle in the center, with the inscription E CHESTNUT SCREAMING EAGLES running around the picture.

The office was off to the left, and Mr. Kamfer pointed and said, "That's the nurse's room. The B wing is that way, and it's club and work spaces. The A wing here has most of the classrooms, the dining room, and the library. One of the, um, incidents happened there."

"If you don't mind," Dipper said, "you might wait in the office for us. Miss Niedermeyer and I will take one quick look and I'll see if I can pick up any readings that might indicate paranormal activity."

"Yes, I can catch up on a little work," Kamfer said almost eagerly. Then, as if realizing he might sound not unlike a coward, he added apologetically, "All this fuss and worry, and missing school, you know how it is, you get behind."

"Certainly," Dipper said. "Oh, one thing—could I have your cell number, please?" He entered it in his contacts list as Kamfer called it out. "It's easier if I just call you now," he said. "That way you'll have my number too." He punched in the number, and Mr. Kamfer's phone rang—the factory-standard chime.

"Got it," the principal said.

"We'll be half an hour to an hour," Dipper told him. "Call me if anything happens on this end."

"Yes," Kamfer said. He watched them make the angled turn down A wing and then went into his office, with some sense of relief.

* * *

"You handled that well," Eloise told Dipper.

"Inside I'm a mass of quivering jelly," he admitted. "My sister does these things better than I do."

A little way down the hall, Eloise pointed. "These are the lockers that showed up on the video. All the locks fell off, and then they started slamming their doors."

Dipper took a look, but they were standard-issue school lockers, old dented ones—chipped gray enamel over thin steel—and so were the padlocks, the kind with a combination dial in the center of the face. He rattled a few random ones, but they were all locked through the holes in the locker-door handles.

"Could have been a prank," he said. "If all the students decided they'd trick the principal, they could've left the locks open and barely hanging, and then used fishing line to yank them off. Is one of these yours?"

"No, mine's down past the two labs here. I'll show you."

Eloise's locker was 618, on the right side of the hall as you headed in. At Dipper's request, she unlocked and removed the padlock. He tugged on the door. The latch held it shut. He had to raise the handle up about an inch before it released, and it didn't move that easily. "Don't think fishing line could've done it," he said. "It takes too much pressure to open the latch. I suppose a prankster could have left the doors barely ajar, though."

"I think that would be noticeable," Eloise said. "But I haven't seen the video."

It was a long hall, and before they reached the lunchroom, Eloise said, pointing, "Tanner Berlinger came in from down there. The side hall's kind of short. You can get to the football field and gym going out, it's a right turn to the door. The only other things on that hall are the book storage room, a janitor's closet, and the room where they store band instruments."

"About where was he when he saw the ghost?" Dipper asked.

"Janna said his locker's one of these on the left. He was standing there and all the lights went out, and he saw her down toward the far end of the hall first, and then she was right in his face."

Dipper took out his anomaly detector and did six scans.

"Anything?" Eloise asked, looking over his shoulder.

"Can't be sure," he said. "There's a sort of sine-wave reading. It would be nothing in Gravity Falls—there's always a weirdness background waver there—but here it's unusual. I tried these out in the motel, and the readings were way low. They're much higher here, but not in the red zone. More orange. Caution, you know."

His phone went off—Grunkle Stanford's ring tone, the theme to an old TV show that Ford had once off-handedly mentioned as one of his favorites when he was a teen—"The Twilight Zone." Its needly, dee-dee-dee-dah notes, culminating in a nervous bongo riff, made Eloise yip and grab Dipper's arm."

"That's my uncle, sending us some info," he said. "Hi, Grunkle Ford."

"Mason," Ford said, his voice rough with weariness. "I'm glad I caught you. You haven't begun the investigation yet, have you?"

"Uh, yes, we're inside the school," he said. "But we haven't tried any exorcisms or anything—"

"Get out now," Ford said. "I believe the phenomenon is not a poltergeist, but an emolental."

"A—_what_?" Dipper asked, blinking.

"Emolental. You don't know the term, I just coined it. Emotion Elemental. You know what an elemental is—"

"Yeah, a permanently unbodied spirit that has powers over the ancient elements, earth, air, fire, water—"

"This is an artificial variant, composed of negatively-charged emotions," Ford said. "It has the power of an elemental, but it's created by humans, unconsciously. These phenomena are exceedingly rare, and they occur in specific places, but only those that have been the site of great pain or emotional anguish—prisons, asylums—"

"High schools," Dipper said. "What do we do?"

"We're into the unknown here," Ford said. "I've put together some formulae that might—MIGHT—disperse the forces, but I don't know for sure that they'll work. Get out of there, study the text I'll electronically mail you in a second—there, it's sent—and after you study the document, cautiously return and try the formulae. I'm contacting Agent Hazard now. It's imperative that she come with you as backup. Get out now, do you understand?"

"Sure," Dipper said. He put the anomaly detector, a very compact model, in the side pocket of his suit jacket and took Eloise's arm. "We're going now."

"Great. You should receive the formulae—"

SCREEEEEE!

Dipper winced as the phone shrieked at him, right in his ear and at an impossible decibel level.

Eloise covered her ears. "Make it stop!"

Dipper ended the call, and the sound cut out. "We've got to move," he said. "Something's happening! Run!"

They ran back the way they came.

Before they'd reached the halfway point of the hall, the lights went out.

There should still have been some light spill—the lobby had those big glass doors, and sunlight would be streaming in, but they were running through absolute blackness. _Stygian_ was the word that swam into Dipper's mind.

The floor was hard when his right foot left it. When his sole came down, it felt spongy, like the leaf mold in an ancient forest.

"What's happening?" Eloise asked, stumbling.

Dipper caught her, and they both fell.

"Wait a second, wait a second," he said, fumbling for his small but powerful penlight, one of McGucket's creations and standard issue for Agents.

The light came on and cast a cloudy cone through air turned misty.

Gnarled roots and ancient trunks surrounded them. Orange gleam of eyes from the underbrush and leaves.

"What's happened?" Eloise asked again. "Where are we?"

An unearthly voice, its tone quavering, its pitch up and down the scale, repeated something that Dipper vaguely recognized as Italian, or just possibly Latin, but he didn't know those languages and had no idea of what it might mean: _mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita, __mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita,_ _mi ritrovai per una selva oscura. . . ._

Each repetition became fainter until finally the voice faded, like a dying echo. And then whatever it was laughed at them.

"OK, OK, don't panic," Dipper said. He got up and helped Eloise to her feet as well. He led her to the trunk of an immense oak, three hundred years old if it was a day, and said, "Put your back against this. Let's get our bearings. This is probably an illusion."

He closed his eyes and then concentrated. He murmured a spell he had learned from one of Ford's Journals intended to dissipate illusions: "_Invoco per virtutem luminis. Quod depelle nebulas, purgare corde meo, me scilicet rursus videbo_."

He opened his eyes. Just the cone of foggy silver from his flashlight.

"Are you talking to it?" Eloise asked in nearly a whisper.

"No, trying to lift the illusion."

"Are you sure it's an illusion?" she asked.

"Pretty sure. Are there any woods around like this?"

"Not that I know of." Now Eloise sounded strangely calm. "Mostly farmlands."

"I don't think we've been transported somewhere else. Not in the real world, anyhow," Dipper said. "Let's move left as far as we can. We should reach the wall or the lockers that way. Hold my arm."

"Don't worry about that," she said.

It was probably better if he turned off the light and closed his eyes. Sidestep. Sidestep. Sidestep. Tree. Go around it. Sidestep. Sidestep . . . .

"This isn't working."

She said, "The moon's wrong."

He opened his eyes. They weren't out of the woods yet, but they stood in a clearing, and high in the sky was a brilliant half-moon, looking golden and larger than life.

"It sure is," he said. "It doesn't look like the Earthly moon at all. And—huh. The top half's illuminated. The side toward the horizon should be—I think. Let's try to get to open country."

They made for breaks in the trees. Finally they emerged from the woods onto a road—an unpaved road, the surface soft with dust. "Maybe we've gone back in time somehow," Dipper said. "This is like a road from pioneer days."

"I never heard of any dirt roads close to the school," Eloise said. "I knew there was something really weird going on."

"You were right," Dipper said. "Hold on." He turned his phone back on. He tried calling Ford's number, but nothing happened. "No bars."

He checked the email. There was one from Ford. He called it up, and read the beginning:

* * *

_Mason:_

_If I am correct in my surmise, the emolental is a malign yet insensate force that has arisen from the strong negative emotions of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people over the centuries. The school stands where once a funeral parlor stood; before that it possibly may have been a battleground in a war waged by the Sioux and Ojibwe peoples. You must carefully identify the area where the emolental is incipient but yet unmanifested. Then use the formula I have appended. It will appear as a dark whirlwind. DO NOT GET CAUGHT INSIDE IT. If you do, DO NOT USE THE FORMULA! You must be outside its range, or else you will doom yourself. Here is the way I think you should proceed . . . ._

* * *

"Helpful?" Eloise asked.

"Not really." He could see her in the buttery light of the insane half-moon. "You seem calm."

"I'm scared," she said. "But I'm with you."

"Hope that helps," he said. "All right. This thing has swallowed us, but we can find a way out." _Don't know how, but we need to keep our wits . . . . _"I think it'll throw some scares at us. For now let's follow this road."

"Wouldn't it want us to do that?"

"Who knows? But until it shows itself—we don't have an opening."

"When it does show itself?" Eloise asked.

Trying to sound braver than he felt, he said, "Then we kick its butt."


	13. Chapter 13

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 13: Fun in Hi Skule?**

**(?)**

"Time's not moving," Dipper said. It had been what felt like hours, and they had trudged the unpaved road until they had to stop and rest. He checked his phone again. No bars—he didn't expect any—and the clock was stuck exactly where it was the first time he had checked: 9:13.

"There's no way out, is there?" Eloise asked as they found a fallen tree and sat on the trunk.

"There's always a way out," he said, trying to put into his voice a confidence he didn't feel.

"Where do you think we are?" she asked. She leaned into him. "Would you—would you just hold my hand? I know you're engaged and all, but—it's dark and I'm scared."

He took her hand. "Where are we? I don't know. I guess in a way we're in the high school hallway—but not completely. We're in a warp of some kind. I don't think it's a whole other dimension, but—it's a place that's shut off from normality, one that messes with our heads."

"It's too big to be the hall," Eloise said. "We must have walked for four or five miles."

"It seems like that," Dipper said. "But—well, we may have been shrunk, for example. We may be tiny, an inch tall, and still in the hallway and just, I don't know, hallucinating this road and this forest."

"You can do anything with me you want, Dipper," Eloise whispered to him in a husky, seductive tone.

"If I only—wait, what?"

"I need a boy," she said. Then she startled and gasped, "Did I—did I just say that out loud?"

"Eloise, we can't—" _Yow! _Dipper's voice had cracked the way it had when he was thirteen, but much worse. He sounded like an adenoidal idiot!

"Why did you dump me for Cinthia, you bastard?" _Crack! _Eloise slapped him so hard the world flashed yellow for a moment.

"It's me! I'm Dipper!" he said, his voice still skating up and down as it cracked.

He jumped up, pulling her to her feet. "Come on! We have to move!"

They almost ran for the first hundred steps. Then Eloise said, "Oh, my God, I thought for a minute you were Jason—and I didn't mean that! And before, well–OK, I've sort of daydreamed about you before, but really I wasn't offering, you know—"

"It's this place," he said, and his voice, thank God, was back to normal. "It's screwing with us. I think it's—it's trying to find our weak spots, our insecurities."

"Then we're doomed!" she said, sounding as if it were intended as a joke—but if so, it misfired.

"Look!" Dipper said, pointing ahead. "Sun's coming up!"

The sun was rising—but the swollen yellow half-moon still loomed in the sky, halfway to the zenith and directly above the brilliant disk of the sun, the illuminated half of the moon impossibly on the side _away_ from the sun.

Like something in a bad dream, fog congealed instantly. The sun became a baleful red glow, the moon merely a smear. The trees on either side of the unpaved road paled and faded until they looked insubstantial, ghostly, a dim phantom forest of twisted, gnarled trees. Eloise cried out in alarm or fright. "Look at me!"

She was dressed in—rags. An extra-large dirty, torn man's shirt that hung to her knees, once white, now yellowed and threadbare. She was barefoot, her legs splotched and splattered with nasty brown mud, and her hair hung straggly and tangled. Tears streaked her muddy face. "I can't go to school like this!"

"Better than my get-up," he said. He wore black brief underwear and nothing else.

Her eyes widened as she realized that. "Oh, my God! Let's go back."

Dipper agreed. They turned and headed back along the road, but . . . there ahead of them floated the angry red disk of the sun and the blurred, bleared moon. No matter which way they turned, they were heading . . . east? Toward the rising sun, anyway. Dipper stopped Eloise. "Wait, wait," he said.

He closed his eyes and felt his chest.

Suit. No doubt about it. And his tie. He opened his eyes and saw his bare chest–now hairy as Grunkle Stan's, ape-hairy, though in truth he had a normal late-teen boy's growth. However, his fingers still felt the suit.

"OK," he said. "Calm down, Eloise. This is a hallucination, that's all. Check your jeans pockets. Close your eyes and put your hand in your pocket."

To him it looked as if she were patting the shirt tail, but then she said, "I feel it. This is crazy."

"It's this place messing with our minds, like I said." Dipper concentrated, telling himself _I'm going to see things as they really are, I'm not going to be fooled._

Starting like an inkblot spreading over his body, his black suit came back, and Eloise's dusky-rose pink sweater and jeans. "Listen and try this," he said, and he talked her through the process. It took her longer, but finally she said, "I see my sneakers now. And there are my jeans legs. And you're no longer nearly naked. Darn it." She giggled.

"That's a good sign," he said in encouragement. "That you can joke. I–hey, I can barely see the floor tile right around our feet!"

"Can't make that out. Listen! What's that?"

Dipper heard it, the sound of a laboring, straining engine. Without knowing how he knew it, he said, "School bus!"

He dragged Eloise to the edge of the road–and their clothes began to change again when he didn't concentrate. Now Eloise was only in bra and panties.

The yellow-and-black bus looked like something from an ancient animated cartoon, something hallucinatory in a pre-Code Betty Boop epic from the Fleischer Brothers. It was a school bus–but one that had a stern face, the windshield two glaring eyes, the grill a mouth full of sharp teeth. And it was rubbery, elastic, bulging and stretching, its tires like smooth balloons with the cross marks of bandages on them.

It squealed to a stop and the grille opened to bawl, "ALLLLLL ABOARRRD!" in a gravelly voice like Popeye the Sailor's. The door opened, and–an enormous tongue the color of liver licked out, scooped up both Eloise and Dipper, and yanked them inside. The bus stood on its rear wheels, its front fenders becoming arms, and it rubbed its oil-pan belly, licking its chops and muttering, "Yum, yum!"

That was bad enough. The inside was a thousand times worse.

* * *

A startled Mr. Kamfer looked up from his tally of the last two weeks' absence reports, and he half-rose from his chair. "What–who–how–?"

The dark, beautiful young woman in the black pantsuit held up a badge wallet. "Agent Hazard, sir. I'm Agent Pines's backup. I just received a distress call. Where is he?"

Kamfer couldn't find his tongue: "Ahew, um, ah, he, he–who are you?"

She snapped the information at him again. "Field Agent Hazard! This is my badge! Agent Pines and young Eloise Niedermeyer are somewhere in this school! Where?"

Finally he got it got it together enough to say, "I, I, I–he didn't mention a partner–"

"It's Agency policy not to," she said. "If you can't help me, I'm going into the school to find them on my own." Though she didn't add the words, Kamfer would later think back on her tone under the impression that she had finished with, "and then it's just too damn bad for you!"

He could think of only one way to locate them. "Uh, um, the monitors–they–come with me."

He led her to an inner office–at one time the workroom, with the copier and the fax machine, and so on–and now half of it had become a surveillance center, where a dozen different monitors on shelves gave live-streamed images of everything from the athletic field to the hallways.

"This is A hall," he said, pointing to the first monitor on the left in the top row. "I mean, not, not, not just a hall, but the hall designated as A, the main classroom wing of–something's wrong."

"I'd say so," Hazard told him grimly. "Unless you normally have a tornado in the hallway."

That was what it looked like–one of those Weather Channel twisters, the low, broad kind, nearly spherical, a twisting mass of dark cloud and smoke. It stood toward the end of the hall–as it spun, you could occasionally glimpse a cross hall beyond it–and bulged, heaved, and whirled.

"Is there sound on this thing?" she asked.

Kamfer turned a knob. The speakers buzzed and crackled with static, but there was no freight-train roar of the kind you get with proper tornadoes. She held up her phone as though she were taking a video and asked, "Are you getting this, S?"

"Getting what?" Kamfer asked in a why-me whine.

"Not you!" snapped Hazard. "Chief? Can you see this?"

A baritone voice from the phone or device or whatever it was said, "I see it. Is it cutting Mason's off line of communication, or–"

"I don't know what the hell it's doing. Sir." After a beat, Agent Hazard added, "I'm going to try to get eyes on it. You–" she turned to Kamfer–"this building is currently a Priority One investigations scene. Don't move from your office. Take this seriously, because you could be hurt or worse if you ignore me. I'm going to go down that hall a short distance to see what this looks like to the naked eye."

"Naked, yes," Kamfer said in a daze.

"If anything blows up or happens to me, you get the hell away from this building and don't try to come back in! Understand?"

"Naked," he said, nodding.

She gave up on him, trotted back into the office and out into the hall, followed it until it made a thirty-degree turn to the right, and then walked down it toward darkness.

Because that's what it looked like from here–a long, long hall, the fluorescents overhead sputtering, until down at the far end a rotating irregular ball of blackness, of nothingness, spun.

"Are you still with me, Chief?" Hazard asked.

"Still following. My word, this is like a negative Portal! Is that electrical discharge? It's hard to see on the small screen."

"I see static discharges, yes," Hazard said. "Like scale-model lightning bolts. They're connecting with the lockers, but the brightest ones are up-and-down. I'm guessing they're tapping the electric lines–whoa!"

About a third of the fluorescent tubes popped, with bright blue-white flares of light–and the shards of thin glass rained down all around her. "It's blowing the lights!" she barked. They all went out at once.

"It didn't anticipate someone coming to check on it," Stanford Pines said.

The emergency lights came on in the halls, the powerful incandescents, battery-powered so they wouldn't last too long, but bright enough to cut through the smoke of a fire. The fire alarm began to shriek, too.

"Fire department will be all over this place in a minute," Hazard said. "Can you–?"

"I'm on it. Chestnut County, right?"

"Roger that. County seat is Miskwi."

"I'll order a condition red. Let's see . . . the National Guard unit commander is in the loop and will back up an order not to engage. That'll hold the public-safety units off for a while. See if you can get closer–but pull back if you have the least trouble."

"I'll get your nephew out if I can," Hazard said.

"No, before trying anything, first take care of yourself. I've got the utmost faith in Dipper."

Huh, Hazard thought. So his uncle knows his _nom de guerre._

She stalked down the hallway toward the spinning ball of chaotic nothingness.

"OK," she said, grinning as she drew a compact quantum destabilizer. "Show me what you got."

* * *

Inside, the school bus was more nearly normal–well, not at _all_ nearly normal, but at least still better than the squash-and-stretch outside had been. Rows of seats lay before Dipper and Eloise, and the bus stretched impossibly long–it had room for hundreds of students, maybe thousands.

Every seat was occupied by cold-faced or angry-faced teens, glaring and nearly snarling as a stumbling Dipper and Eloise tried to find their way back to a seat, any seat, where they wouldn't tumble flat on their faces each time the bus jolted. The grumbling, hate-filled voices followed them, striking them like blows from a whip:

"Skank!"

"Dipshit!"

"Ugly A.F!"

"Choo lookin' at, jerkface?"

_Worst of all, _Wendy had said of high school, _everybody hates you!_

"Don't listen to this," Dipper said to Eloise.

Instantly the rows of sneering kids began to mock him: "Don't wissen!"

He took a deep breath. _Don't let it get to you. This isn't real. THEY aren't real. This is just–the worst of the messed-up stuff that happens in high school, boiled down to pure mean._

Before they found a single empty seat, the bus vanished around them, and there they stood in front of a warped and distorted high school. Mist all around. The red sun baleful, the yellow blurred moon like a mouth of bad teeth grimacing in anger.

Through the wavery panes of glass in the front doors, Dipper could see the big clock again, but it had changed.

Now the students weren't the Screaming Eagles any more, apparently.

An insanely ugly and leering face had replaced the bird. And now the team colors were orange and red.

Evidently the mascot now was the Mofo From Hell.

The doors opened of their own accord. The building seemed to pulsate like something breathing.

"Do we have to go inside?" Eloise whispered.

"I don't think we've got a choice," Dipper said. "But remember–none of it's real. I think if we can make it through this building, we'll come out on the far side."

"Into what?" Eloise asked.

He still held her hand. He gave it a reassuring squeeze. "God knows, but it's bound to be better than this."


	14. Chapter 14

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**(?)**

**Chapter 14: Nothing Is What It Seems**

Stanford Pines did feverish calculations, not with the computer—he still had not fully mastered it, being impatient at reading manuals and directions—but with a slipstick, an old-fashioned (but very complex) slide rule. Manipulating the slide within the stator and moving the clear glass cursor over both, he went through a series of complex mathematical operations nearly as fast as he could have done at a keypad. He muttered to himself as he jotted the calculations down on a yellow pad.

His wife, Lorena, tapped on the study door and opened it unobtrusively. "Fiddleford's here," she said.

"Ask him to come in, please," Stanford said. "Oh—Lorena, have I eaten breakfast?"

"No, and you didn't have dinner, either. You haven't left your study since last night," Lorena said. "I'll bring a tray. An orange for you?"

"Please, and something else, I don't care what, something for energy. And coffee, a big mug. And ask Fiddleford if he wants anything. And I love you, and thank you!"

A moment later, Fiddleford eased into the study—the floor had become a book maze, with volumes stacked haphazardly, so he had to step in narrow lanes between them. "What in thunderation's a-goin' on?" he asked. "Lorena's frettin' herself to a frazzle over you!"

Stanford, frowning slightly, raised a six-fingered hand for silence. Fiddleford bent over a chair, moved a stack of ponderous books—Klein's _Multi-Worlds and String Theory, _Heifertz's _Operational Algebraics, _and Lafwell's _Hyperdimensionality: The Theoretical Foundations_—and sat leaning forward, with his elbows bent and his hands on his knees, patiently waiting.

It took Stanford a long time to finish filling the page with numbers and symbols. Then he looked up, slightly dazed. "Where were we?"

"Well, me, I was just a-comin' in," Fiddleford said. "You were settin' there, a-fooling around with that dang slippy-slidey rule. I keep tellin' ya, I can teach you how to use a computer fer that in about twenty ding-dang lessons iffen you'd—"

"No time, no time," Ford said impatiently. He tore out the page. "Here. Take a look at these. Can you check my calculations and if they're correct, order them in a Markstein's sequence, see what that feeds out?"

"I reckon," Fiddleford said, adjusting his spectacles and casting his gaze on the complexities that Stanford had handed him. "Lordy mercy, this here's harder'n a IRS auditor's heart! I don't see nothin' wrong offhand. But why in tunketation are you—"

Lorena interrupted with a tray. "I brought a little breakfast," she said. She handed Ford a mug of coffee—it happened to be a Mystery Shack Mega-Mug, holding a pint and tricked out to the extent that as one drank and the cup cooled, the cup darkened from white to deep burnt orange, hiding the WHAT IS THE MYSTERY SHACK? inscription on the side.

She gave Fiddleford a matching one, and he topped his with a little cream and plopped in two lumps of sugar. Also on the tray were a peeled and sectioned orange—the usual basis of a Stanford Pines breakfast, mostly because for thirty years he had dimension-hopped to strange and unique realities that shared one property (no oranges grew there). Lorena had thoughtfully added two big frosted cinnamon rolls, still warm, along with a big brown pill in a little paper cup. She said, "Sweetheart, let me see you take your vitamin. I won't leave until you do."

Ford nodded, popped it in his mouth, and swallowed. He nearly choked before gulping down some coffee. "I did that out of order again. Thank you, dear."

Lorena bent down and kissed the top of his head. "I'll let you boys play now," she said, doing a complicated sort of dance through the stacks of books before she got to the door, exited, and closed it.

Fiddleford took a bite of one of the cinnamon rolls. "Right tasty. Lorena make these?"

"Hm? What? Oh, yes, she, um, bakes. The computer, Fiddleford?"

Sounding cantankerous, Ford's old friend grumbled, "You want me to drive back home, or you want to move your butt an' let me get at that there keyboard?"

Ford stared at him blankly, glanced at the computer, and realized he was sitting in the desk chair. "Sorry," he said, getting up. He took the small bowl with the orange and his mug of coffee and he and Fiddleford traded places, the tray with the rolls on the desk between them.

"You just eat your breakfast now, don't chew loud, an' let my magical fingers feed this data in. Open wide, RAM, here comes some figgers for ya!"

Ford was a fast typist, even using two fingers on each hand, but Fiddleford was a master. He played the keyboard the way Martha Argerich could play the piano, like a virtuoso. He'd hit 200 words per minute a few times in standard keyboarding tests, and he wasn't much slower than that in transferring Ford's calculations to a formula.

"Go on an' eat," he said without looking away from what he was doing. "No use in your blood glucose a-saggin' lower than the seat of your baggy drawers." He finished with a few taps and with a flourish hit ENTER. "There. And . . . auto check!"

The computer took a few nanoseconds to do what would take Fiddleford or Ford hours. "How is it?" Ford asked with his mouth full.

"Let's see . . . yeah, you done good, Ford. She checks out perfect. So what is this—" he turned, glanced at the tray, and looked disappointed.

"What's wrong?" Ford asked urgently.

"You done et my cinnamon roll," Fiddleford said plaintively. "I had a bite out'n it, and you done et it. You done et _both_ of 'em!"

"There . . . were cinnamon rolls?" Ford asked, staring blankly at the two empty plates.

Fiddleford sighed. "Yeah, but don't you worry none. I'm sure Lorena will have another'n. Okee-dokee. 'Bout this here sequence, the formula's ready to feed into whatever you're a-gonna feed it into, so now iffen you don't mind, tell me—what's up?"

"It's Dipper," Ford said. Unlike Dipper's father, who usually called him "Mason" when speaking about him, Ford called him "Mason" face to face and talked about him to others as "Dipper." That's probably either significant or not.

"What's the matter with him?" Fiddleford asked him. "This here line of spooky figgerin' looks like he's occupyin' null space, which is logicamathically unpossible."

"I'm not sure," Ford said. "It's a unique situation. Anyway, I'm going to use the multiplanar detector to locate his most probable position. Uh—go ask Lorena for another sweet roll, this will take a little time. And ask her if I can have another. I just realized I'm hungry."

* * *

Time. It marches on. It waits for no man. It's like a river that you can only step in once.

If one is French and fond of the kind of cookie called madeleines, one might even begin researches into lost time and wind up with a multi-volume novel.

Lovers are always welcomed as time goes by.

Time is an illusion, tea-time doubly so.

The Queen will behead anyone who murders the time.

Time heals all wounds and wounds all heels. Time flies like an arrow (but fruit flies like a banana). Time runs like sands through an hourglass.

Time is the stream where Thoreau fished.

Time's a-wasting. Time to get a move on.

Time is a thief.

Time.

Time.

Time.

No time like the present.

No . . . time . . . no time . . . at all . . . .

All that rattled around in Dipper's head as, according to his phone, not one second passed.

God, that ghastly school. Bullies three times Dipper's size harangued him, slapped him, taunted him, tried to give him wedgies, tried to make him cry. Girls who looked like beauty queens belittled Eloise's hair, her features, her clothing, screamed insults at her, denigrating everything from her taste in shoes to her morality. "Whore" was one of the milder names they called her.

Both she and Dipper suddenly developed hideous rashes of acne, faces so rubbled with oozy red, white, and black pimples that their own parents wouldn't have known them. Teachers raged at them. They were sent to the principal's office, which evidently was a hundred miles away down the endless corridor and which they realized they would never reach.

They held hands, telling each other "It's not real. It's not real" until the words became a mindless empty mantra, like a prayer desperately repeated by a once-devout priest who had lost his faith.

When they almost reached the breaking point, though, they helped each other as best they could. The relief-map of acne pimples subsided as they stared at each other, willing the illusion away. The disfiguring bumps and pimples gradually vanished. But the effort left them gasping.

"There," Dipper said. "Another hallucination. It's gone now."

A small victory. Still, now that they were in this—whatever it was, all the way in, the way out seemed hopelessly hidden.

"I don't think we're ever going to escape from here," Eloise moaned.

"Don't say that," Dipper urged. "That's what it's trying to do—take hope away from us. If we give in, we won't find our way out. We gotta keep trying. Remember when the Westminster House tried to lose us in a maze? We got out of that."

"This is worse," she said glumly. "I thought it was a ghost, but this is—it's like the whole school is the ghost, isn't it?"

"I don't know," Dipper admitted. "Some force is trying to control us—no, it's not a ghost, not a human ghost, anyway. Grunkle Ford called it an emolental, which is a word he made up. Look, let's think about this."

They happened to stand close to a blackboard—a real blackboard, made of old-fashioned slate, not a dry-erase whiteboard or a green chalkboard, but one that could have been in a school in the 1800s—if schools in the 1800s had blackboards a hundred feet wide and fifty feet tall.

Dipper grabbed a piece of chalk. It was like grabbing a shard of volcanic glass, and his stinging fingers started to drip blood. _Illusion,_ he told himself, clamping his teeth against the pain. He slashed chalk letters onto the board: EARTH AIR FIRE WATER. "OK, these are the Four Elements, right? You know about them?"

"Um," Eloise said. She looked exhausted to the point of vertigo. "Four elements. Um, let me think—Somebody, a Greek, who was it—um, Empedocles! Empedocles said there were four elements, and that everything else was a mixture of the four."

"Right!" Dipper said. The chalk no longer lacerated his fingers, because his fingers had become brittle sticks of chalk. "But other ancient cultures believed the same kind of thing—Babylonian, Sumerian. Chinese. The Chinese added another element, Void, to the list. OK, now, later philosophers started to think that each of these four elements had—ah, a kind of guiding spirit? I guess. Those were called elementals."

He turned back to the board and under each element he wrote another word: EARTH/GNOME, AIR/SYLPH, FIRE/SALAMANDER, WATER/NYMPH. "These aren't, you know, what we think of today, I mean a Gnome is a little humanoid figure now—"

"Like a lawn gnome," Eloise agreed. "White beard, red cap, I know. And a salamander's a kind of amphibian. It resembles a lizard."

"Yeah, but in the legend, a salamander is the spirit of fire. It was, who, who?—yeah, Paracelsus who first described these spirits as being 'outside of Nature.' The salamander, for example, could, you know, control fire—make it hotter or cooler, make it break out spontaneously, make even things that don't burn catch fire—use it as a weapon—get it?"

"Ahead of you," Eloise said. "Your uncle's word means a spirit of emotions—"

"_Bad _emotions," Dipper said. He made a face. "High-school emotions."

"Bad emotions, and the emolental can control them and create them—so it's, what? _Feeding_ on us?"

"I think it's trying to take over the school," Dipper said. "All the students. Spreading fear and anger and so on. That makes it stronger. But we got ourselves inside it. Now it's trying to wear us down. Maybe absorb us? Or squeeze the bad emotions out of us, or the opposite, drive us to despair by filling us with them?"

"Can your uncle help us?"

Dipper bit his lip. Never give away secrets of the Agency. But then he wasn't a real Agent. "There's a backup Agent on site," he said. "Maybe she can help us. But first of all, we've got to figure out how to help ourselves."

"Bad emotions, huh? I want to try something," Eloise said. "Hold still."

She pulled him close and kissed him on the mouth.

And for a flicker of a moment, the nightmare school went away and they were standing in an ordinary classroom.

But then—

The darkness flooded back in and Time crashed to a halt again.


	15. Chapter 15

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 15: Massacre at East Chestnut High**

**(?)**

"It's mathematically feasible, I reckon!" pronounced Fiddleford, studying the printout when the computer finished its third run. "But, Ford, what you're a-thinkin–well, I mean, this is dang close to the Portal business, and you promised you'd never do anything like that again."

"Desperate times, desperate measures," Ford said, shoving his rolling chair back from the keyboard and snatching the USB memory stick from the socket. "Come on." Passing through the living room, he said, "Lorena, we have urgent business up at the Mystery Shack. I'll call and let you know more later–oh, thank you."

"This one," she said, holding the cinnamon roll on a small paper plate just out of his reach, "is for Fiddleford. Here you are."

Fiddleford beamed as he accepted the pastry. "That's right thoughtful of you, thanks! And these are real, I mean, good!"

"Thank you," she said, smiling. "Have fun storming the castle."

Ford stopped on the threshold and turned to face his wife. "What? What castle? Did I miss–"

"It's a movie reference," Fiddleford said, grabbing his arm. "Come on, you're in a durn hurry, remember? I swear, you ain't got no life outside'n the lab and the classroom, you know that? Let's go, I'll explain it."

Despite living just a few hundred feet down the hill from the Shack, Ford got into his Lincoln, Fiddleford settled into the passenger seat, started between bites of his roll to explain _The Princess Bride,_ and they drove up. By the time Ford had parked, Fiddleford had rushed through the sweet roll–pity, it deserved to be enjoyed–and he stopped in the gents' to wash his sticky fingers as Ford headed through the gift shop. Soos and Wendy were just refreshing some stocks of merch, and Soos said, "Dr. Pines, dawg! How's your bonkers-creepy supernatural school–?"

"Can't talk now, emergency," he said. "Mason's in trouble." He tapped the code in on the vending machine pad, and the whole thing swivelled open to reveal the hidden steps.

Wendy thrust a handful of dark green question-mark tee shirts into Soos's hands and said, "Cover for me, Boss."

"Yes, ma'am!" Soos said, almost coming to attention. It had sounded at least like a drill sergeant's command.

Wendy clattered down the steps just a few feet behind Ford. He didn't look back but in a preoccupied tone said, "The first thing we have to do is set up a plasmic induction coil pad. Then we'll input the sequence, and that should theoretically make communication between any null-space breaches possible, and assuming there are no more active ones between here and Minnesota, then–"

At the elevator door, he finally looked around and did a double take at the sight of Wendy. "You're not Fiddleford!" he said.

"Ya reckon?" Wendy said in a cackly old-timer voice, almost as good as Mabel's impression of the eccentric inventor. "Dr. P., what kind of trouble is Dipper in? And don't tell me you're in too much of a hurry. I've got to know, man!"

"Hold y' gol-dang horses!" It was the real Fiddleford, coming down the steps and slopping a little coffee from another giant-sized mug. The elevator doors opened.

"Um, did I say Mason?" Ford asked, pausing right at the entrance to the elevator. "I meant, um, there _may be _some trouble."

"He didn't neither mean that," Fiddleford told Wendy. "Now, Ford, you just tell Wendy what you done tole me an' don't give her no run-around nor backtalk. She and the boy are engagified to be married! She's got a right to know!"

"Into the elevator, then," Stanford said They crowded in and he punched a button. "Very well. I'm sorry for attempting to mislead you, Wendy, but–all right, it's my fault. I sent Mason–Dipper–off to Minnesota to investigate what I thought would be a routine low-level poltergeist manifestation, but it's turned out to be at least a Level 9 Probability Breach Vortex. I believe he's trapped, but there just may be a way for us to communicate with him, and if we can do that, there are at least six ways that he might be able to free himself."

"Might?" Wendy asked, her voice dangerously calm.

"It'll work, Wendy," Fiddleford said.

"It just better," she said grimly.

They rode down to what Fiddleford called "Ford's Hell," the lowest level of the lab and one that carried horrible memories for him. It was where, once, the Portal inspired by Bill Cipher had stood, where in a trial run Fiddleford had been dragged head-first into insanity and nightmare. Indeed, it was where Stanford himself had vanished, drawn into a multiplicity of alternate realities that had held him for thirty long years.

But dating even from before Weirdmageddon, Ford had returned and had put destroying the Portal at the top of his to-do list. The Portal was long dismantled, pieces of it repurposed to less dangerous uses–but this level of the labs contained technologies pilfered from a thirty-million-year-old* crashed alien spaceship, and their potential both for harm and for good was–well, Fiddleford might say "unimaginabobble."

"All right," Ford said, hurrying to his main and most powerful computer.

In a woman's voice reminiscent of Lorena's, it politely said, "Good morning, Dr. Pines. What shall we explore today?"

Without replying to the machine, Ford slipped into his chair, plugged in the memory stick, and began to tap on the keyboard. Sounding distracted, he murmured, "Wendy, Fiddleford and I have work to do, and I can't stop to explain until we finish–"

"I'll help," she said.

"Good idee!" Fiddleford told her. He was unpacking some enormous pie-wedge flat metallic plates with imprinted circuitry from a cabinet. "You can start by clearin' off the floor over yonder. Move them chairs and the table back again th' wall. Then we gotta put together this here jiggy-saw puzzle floor an' hook her up to the computermajig."

"I'll . . . clear the floor," Wendy said, and she started doing just that.

* * *

"Happy thoughts," said a dejected Eloise, "ain't gonna cut it."

"No," Dipper agreed.

It seemed worth trying, especially after Eloise's stolen kiss had held the darkness momentarily at bay. They came up with things and concentrated on them–Dipper on Wendy's telling him sure, she'd marry him, his relief when Mabel had agreed to leave Mabel Land for the real world with him, even–gasp!–his near hysterical delight when Ford had walked out of the Portal and had been introduced by Stanley: "The author of the Journals–my brother!"

Eloise thought of the day her parents promised her a car for graduation. The day she had won the district spelling bee. The time her mom had come back from the doctor's with the announcement, "It isn't cancer!"

The results were a little like striking a match in the eye of a hurricane at midnight: Little flares of light, little bursts of glimpses of the school, the real school around them, quickly extinguished by the roaring winds of illusion.

"If we had something that we could think of together," he said. So they tried telling each other the story of how they'd toured the Westminster House in late March of 2014. It had been spooky fun at first, rambling through the incredible architectural jumble of the old house, hearing stories of how its owner had been superstitious and believed she would not die until construction on the place had stopped–and so she had never stopped it, up until the day she did, apparently die.

According to lore, it had become the resting place for ghosts. Dipper and Eloise had discovered it was more than lore–literally dozens of ghosts had come there, stuck between this world and the afterlife, in thrall to an undead wizard, a lich, that drew sustenance from them.

They had at last banished the lich and had freed the ghosts, and that was a moment of relief and happiness for both of them–yet it was not strong enough. The hallucinatory school with its endless hallway faded, and they could see the glimmers of the very real emergency lights, but it was as if they were still trapped inside a whirlwind of gray and black air, dirty air.

And then the illusionary school came back. In addition to the visual deceptions, it brought screechy, nails-on-chalkboard sounds, sounds to make their teeth ache, and stenches like rotting flesh, clotting blood, other reeks. Or it made the air seem thin, oxygen-depleted, making them hyperventilate to the point of vertigo.

And now as the real school faded out and the hallucinatory one faded in, all around them lay dismembered corpses, students and teachers, some beheaded, some armless or legless, all of them bleeding–and all of them weirdly still alive, bawling "You did this to us!" They crawled toward Dipper and Eloise with blood-streaked arms. Disembodied heads hunched toward them on ragged stumps of neck, trailing slimy smears of red, eyes bugging, bloated tongues protruding, hissing voices wailing curses.

That horror got to Eloise most of all, what hurt her most seemed to be not the hideous wounds, but the accusations. "No! Shut up! We didn't do _anything _to you! You–you're not even real! You're not!"

Dipper grabbed her shoulders. "Don't look! They want to scare you," he said. "Don't let them."

She was crying. "Everybody always blames me!" she bawled. "Mom–Mom said Jason and I were sneaking around and–and–but we weren't! I told her it was a traffic jam, but she grounded me–and–and–nobody ever believes me–and–"

He hugged her. "I believe you," he said. "Calm down."

She held onto him. "Ever–ever since I started high–high school–"

"I know, I know," he said, just holding her. "High school is hell on kids."

* * *

Though to Dipper only a few moments seemingly had gone by in the maelstrom of horror, back in Gravity Falls, Fiddleford and Wendy had spent over half an hour piecing together the metallic circuit flooring. Fiddleford had her stand away from it and connected it to the energy source that Ford had invented–a small cube studded over with 120- and 220-volt outlets, the red ones capable of a high amperage.

The flooring had plugged into a red 220-volt outlet. It began to vibrate and hum. Or hiss.

"It's a-workin'," Fiddleford said. "Now, you gotta run the computermajig, so I'll stand on the flooramabob and see if I can catch sight of the–"

"I think I have a better chance of spotting him," Ford said. "More of a connection. So you run the computer."

Fiddleford shook his head. "Naw, you know the parameters of the sequencing lots more better'n I do, I'd prob'ly lose you. It's gotta be–"

"Me."

They both looked at Wendy.

"It's right dangerous, gal," Fiddleford said. With an effort, he changed his speech pattern: "Seriously, Wendy, what's happened, Ford thinks, is that the entity that Dipper's investigating–"

"An emolemental," Ford said. "Tt's a concatenation off all the bad emotions and memories that have taken place in an old high school–a disembodied spirit full of spite and hate–"

"That thing's snared Dipper in a kind of whirlymajig Ford calls a null-space vortex–"

"Whatever it is," Wendy said, "I'm the one to go. You two wait right here and don't do anything until I get back."

"There's a code to get in!" Ford called as she dashed to the elevator.

"You think I don't already know it, Dr. P?" she called back. She hopped in, the elevator whined, and Ford and Fiddleford looked at each other. "Do you reckon she can do it?" Fiddleford asked his old friend.

Ford drew in a deep, shaky breath. "Well–the question may be moot. I mean, we may fail to make contact, you know. We're conjuring up an artificial breach into null-space. Theoretically, any openings into null-space should automatically connect to it as if there were no distance between them. However, we do have a certain problem–"

"Nobody knows if null-space is anything more'n a gol-dang mathematical fancifcation of a theory," Fiddleford said. "In which case, ain't no tellin' what we're gonna punch into when we throw that sequencer switch."

"It's quite dangerous," Ford said. "Maybe you should disable the elevators so Miss Corduroy won't be able to return–"

Fiddleford straightened his shoulders. "Nossir. She's plumb right, an' you know it. She oughta be the one who steps onto the pad, regardless what might happen to her. If we can't bring Dipper back, she ain't gonna want to live without him. Yeah, this here's what Stanley would call a long ol' shot, but, Ford, you gotta throw one more thing into the balance on her side."

"What?" Ford asked, raising his eyebrows.

The elevator doors opened, and Wendy hurried in, brandishing an axe. "I'm ready," she said. "Fire the sucker up." She walked to the center of the pad, glaring defiance at Ford.

"It's love, Ford," Fiddleford said. "Ya gotta throw in on her side that thing called love."

* * *

*An age of thirty million years was Stanford's estimate. The crashed saucer had in reality been buried for 30,212,618 years when Ford first discovered it, and now had lain there under its hill for 30,212,652 years, but since all the aliens were long dead (probably), the slight difference didn't matter very much.


	16. Chapter 16

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 16: Where in the World is Dipper Pines?**

**(?)**

In Hallway A of East Chestnut High, Agent Hazard tapped her lapel pin—which doubled as a direct phone line, and said, "Sir! Are you available?"

Immediately, Stanford Pines said, "Here, Agent."

In the background, Hazard heard an old man's voice: "What are you jabberin' about, Ford?"

And a girl's, familiar, somehow: "Can't we get a move on?"

Then the Chief's again: "I'm on the phone with my BlueGums ear attachment. I have someone on the ground at the scene. Shush! Go ahead, Agent."

"I'm ten meters from the disturbance, sir," she said. "It has the appearance of—well, a rotating ball of dark gray cloud. It was arcing electricity to the lights and the wall outlets, but I had the power to the building shut off. Now it's just whirling—I estimate thirty rpm, though I might be off—should I try the QD sir?"

"Negative! That is a negative. Our people may be inside there. Hold your position, and if anything happens, get back to me immediately. Repeat that!"

"Negative on the QD, hold position, report back if anything changes."

"Roger that. And Agent Hazard—be alert! Be alert for anything! I'm trying a remote solution. I need five minutes—"

"Five minutes?" It was the girl's voice—Wendy! Hazard recognized it from her eavesdropping.

She said, "Sir, tell Wendy that we're on top of things."

"She knows that. Let me work. I'll be in touch if we have news or orders for you."

"Roger that. Hazard out."

She had the weirdest sensation that this—this unnatural tornado, this . . . thing—was watching her, alertly, without immediate threat, but with contained menace, like a well-fed cat eyeing a mouse, just waiting for it to come within reach of the claws.

Hazard kept the quantum-destabilizer pistol level. Despite her sense of overwhelming peril, she grinned. She took a knee, in order to brace an elbow on her thigh and keep the QD centered on the mass. "Just try it," she cooed. "Just try it once, you fecker." She had once dated a charming Irish fellow who'd used that pronunciation, and though the guy regrettably turned out to be so evil that she'd had to arrest him and have him, um, sent away, she rather liked the way he said the words. It was so close, and yet different enough. It wouldn't have scandalized Hazard's mother, rest her soul.

The eerie thing, she decided, was that for all the violence that seemed to spin the . . . apparition, whatever it was, it made no sound. It spun in a kind of ghastly silence, like a Weather Channel tornado, all right, but with the sound turned off. Still holding the QD centered on the threat, with her other hand, Hazard reached inside her top and produced a pair of spectacles, which she opened with a flip and donned.

There. Like Agent Pines's—hell, Trainee Pines's—pair, these glasses had no corrective lenses. They did have a paranormal-signal alert and a rear-view function. She activated both, then steadied the QD's aim again. Now she could see behind her, the hallway lit only with the yellow glow of the emergency lights, as well as the rotating whatsis in front of her. The paranormal indicator began a rapid red blink.

It was a threat. Well, knock me down with a feather, how could I have even guessed that?

Her adrenaline pumping, her heart rate up there in the fight-or-flight zone, Hazard grinned again, almost hoping that another one of the things would just try sneaking up on her from behind.

That would only give her an excuse to shoot.

* * *

"All right," Stanford said in his lab. "The dry-run summary doesn't indicate any immediate danger to us."

"I didn't even see anything a-happenin'," Fiddleford said.

"The field activated," Stanford told him. "I got a good strong E-P signal. You didn't see anything happening on the pad because, first, it wasn't at full power, and second, there's nothing currently in or above the pad but air. It hasn't been contaminated by emolentals or the baggage one brings along."

Wendy had run back upstairs briefly, shedding her green blazer and her sensible shoes and her black slacks. She'd replaced them with her work boots, her laddered tight jeans, and—well, nothing.

In fact, she'd even peeled off her blouse and now was ready to go in just her undershirt, freeing her arms for any strong exertions. Oh, and she'd also zipped back into the gift shop, which Soos had not yet opened, to snatch a blue-and-white pine-tree hat off the rack. Her own—well, Dipper's—was safe in her bedroom. "Pay you for this later!" she'd yelled at Soos, clapping the replacement on her head.

"It's OK!" Soos called after her. "I'll give you, like, the employees' discount!" He made a mental note to tell that to Stanley when he showed up later on. That would impress him. "I'm, like, a business typhoon," he told himself as he checked the tour-bus schedule for the day. "No, wait, that doesn't sound right. I'm a business Ticonderoga number 2! Yes!"

Wendy rushed back down the stairs. "We ready?" she asked.

Fiddleford held a book open, while Ford leaned toward it, holding his spectacles. "Almost. I need the latitude and longitude . . . is that the best map we have of Minnesota?"

"Oh, for—" Wendy sat down at a second computer terminal. "There a password on this thing?"

"Try 'Fireball XL5,' no spaces, capital F and XL,'" Fiddleford said.

Wendy typed that in. "For real?"

"It was my favorite show when I was a kid," Ford muttered defensively.

"An' he never gits around t'changin' the ding-dang passwords," Fiddleford added. "That was what it was back when we built the gosh-durn Portal."

Wendy opened Goggle Mapping. "Sure has a fast connection."

"Yeah," Fiddleford agreed. "That was my doin'. Instantaneous-like."

"OK, OK, what's the stupid place in Minnesota?"

"Um, Winnemunka," Ford said, and then he spelled it.

"Wide place in the road," Wendy muttered. "How close you want this?"

"If you could narrow it down to East Chestnut County High School, that would be advantageous," Ford said.

". . . County High School," murmured Wendy as she typed in the search info. "Got it. Ready for the latitude and longitude?"

"Ready."

"How close do you want it?"

"Nearest five seconds," Ford said.

Wendy read the numbers out, and Ford typed them in.

"Save a heap o' time if you'd just cross-link the master computer to one what could do quick lookups like that'n," Fiddleford said.

"You do that," Ford told him.

"By cracky, I will!" Fiddleford said, interlacing his fingers and making his knuckles crack, or cracky, or something. "Ain't been down here t' do no real work in too long! You got it now, Ford?"

"I . . . think so," Ford said. "Fiddleford, I want you to keep a close watch on what happens. Wendy, please step to the center of the pad. Keep your axe inside the perimeter. Oh, and arms and legs, too, that would be a good idea. I'm not sure how high the field reaches—how tall are you?"

"Five-eleven. Six, in my boots," she said.

"My word! I had no idea. Six feet, give a 10 per cent safety factor, let's see, that's 2.01168 meters . . . Good, rough estimate shows an extent of at least 2.5 meters, you'll be all right if you remain in the exact center. Little more to your right. Half a step back. That's good. Just for safety, crouch a little. Hold your axe crosswise. Good. Now, I'm not sure how this is going to manifest. You'll seem to go away if we successfully open null-space. Things may get weird."

"You think?" Wendy said. "Come on!"

"Very well. Once you're sure you're . . . ah, not here anymore, somewhere else, then you can explore. Your body won't actually leave this location, so we can pull you back at any time, but your—what's that Tibetan word, Fiddleford?"

"Tulpa?"

"Yes, that. Your tulpa—but that's not accurate, either, because—"

"Oh, horse feathers! Gal, you're a-gonna projectify an astral form of yourself. Anything you can do here, you can do in null-space, but it'll be a projected form of you, not your material body. Understand that?"

"No," Wendy said. "Do it!"

"Good luck," Ford said, and he activated the pad.

* * *

"I think I liked it better when it was a whole school," Eloise whispered.

The apparition, the emolental, whatever it was, had morphed. Dipper had no idea of why it had done so, but it had collapsed the space around them. Now they stood trapped in one horrendous classroom, which restlessly melted, flowed, and reformed. Desks began as old-fashioned ones, curlicued green wrought-iron frames, pine tops defaced with years of carvings and inked-in graffiti, even a hole for an inkwell, and then they melted and reformed as sleek steel-and-plastic units, or as long tables with chairs, or—it was dizzying. Sometimes they were pulsating fungal shapes, oozing clear slimy liquid.

The floor felt like that of a bouncy-house in hell. When Dipper took a step, the floor flexed, felt as if it were about to burst open, like that nasty thick skim that forms on the top of refrigerated pudding, and suck him down. Or it bulged, reminding him of the one and only time that Mabel had talked him into going horseback riding. It was the exact feel that the horse gave him before suddenly throwing him four feet into the air and then vacating the space beneath him, so he crashed hard to the ground, losing his breath and gaining an understanding that horses were barely evolved above their vicious carnivore jungle forebears and wanted to kill him.

Worse than that, though, worse than the horrible twisting roots that had inched like snakes down the walls and now interlocked and grew and grew—the walls-closing-in cliché, but slowed down so it might take a month for them to be crushed and absorbed—worse than the flecks of white ash that constantly snowed down in the semi-darkness and melted into disgusting grease when they touched flesh, leaving behind a smell like rotting meat—worse than all this was the sense that opposite them, no matter where they went or in what direction they moved, something dark and insatiable waited for them, a form barely visible to them, and it waited for the ideal moment to destroy them.

Waited too patiently for the instant they lowered their guard.

Dipper had tried the Agency's spectacles. The red warning light shone bright and steady, and the readouts that he could see in glowing orange in the left lens constantly changed, blinking out, blinking in, rarely holding steady for very long.

Three times they went through the entire list of all alien or paranormal entities, not settling on any one thing—though the reading ELEMENTAL did linger the longest, hinting to Dipper that his great-uncle's diagnosis had been accurate. Finally, the scans stopped as one phrase showed up: UNKNOWN. AVOID.

Well, that was just great. He reached up and removed the glasses. At this point they were only a distraction. But he folded them and slipped them into his pocket. "What's that noise?" he asked. It buzzed on the edge of his hearing, like the wail of the dyslexic mosquitoes he'd run into out in the woods, on Gants Hill. BEWARB, indeed.

"I can hear it," Eloise said. "I think it's kids' voices, but a long way off."

"Kids just past the gates of hell, maybe," Dipper said.

"What?"

"We read part of _Dante's Inferno_," he told her. "Just past the 'Abandon all hope' sign, Dante hears a horrific wailing. Must've sounded like that."

They couldn't make out any words, but—wait. Maybe that was it—maybe these were the voices of all high-school students, everywhere, who'd had the hope drained or crushed or beaten out of them.

"What is that?" Eloise whispered, gripping Dipper's arm so hard it hurt. "A bear?"

He saw it, something very dark and moving, and yes, bear-sized. It lurched and shambled toward them, one slow pulse at a time.

Some time before, if time had any meaning now, he'd switched off his flashlight to save the battery. He brought it out now and stabbed the brilliant cone of light toward whatever was shuffling toward them.

And wished he hadn't.

It was way worse than a bear. Worse even than the Multibear, whose appearance took some getting used to—bulky, nearly as tall as the ceiling, which now dangled with roots, the form was pale and its surface seemed to bubble and squirm.

Because it was made of maggots. They dripped, they oozed, they fell off in a little patter as the monstrosity moved forward, not walking, but creeping on its base like a nightmare slug.

The component squirming maggots dropped away hastily from the light—but the writhing mass kept coming mindlessly none the less.

"Kill it!" Eloise screamed.

Dipper swept the beam over it, and the maggots scattered—but in the dim corners they began to re-form.

And whatever they were forming into this time—growled.


	17. Chapter 17

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 17: Emolental**

**(October 1, 2016)**

Standing on the round pad, Wendy tensed as Ford activated the machine. The surface beneath her boots vibrated and started to hum, a high-pitched sound like a hive of angry hornets. No, not quite, higher-pitched, though just as furious. Soprano hornets.

For a second, she felt as if tiny ants were creeping all over her skin—she tingled, she itched. Then when she tried to breathe, it was as though the air refused to enter her lungs, giving her a lurching moment of panic—but she refused to break the pose, closed her lips and strained her muscles to control herself.

_I can do this! I know from swimming that I can hold my breath for at least three minutes. Come on—something happen!_

And then—

It started with a milk-white glow stained faintly here and there with the color of a ripe peach skin, swirling all around her, faster and faster. At first a mist, then it became a fog, and then so opaque that the lab beyond it vanished from her sight. It took everything Wendy had not to stagger, because over her washed the same kind of wild dizziness you get if you stand a golf club up on its business end, press your forehead against its butt, and run counterclockwise around it for about a hundred steps as fast as you can.

Don't try that at home. You will fall over or run into any hard, hurty things in the room. Then, too, it's untidy. You almost always vomit. In fact, don't try it in anybody's home, unless its someone whose furniture is all soft and whom you don't like very much.

But despite the sickening vertigo, Wendy clenched her jaw and hunkered down, bending her knees, and then realized _I'm breathing again._

True, the air had an odd ozone-y smell, like that electrical odor her brother's old electric train set had given off, at least before Junior took the locomotive apart and then tried to adjust the rheostat so he could electrocute flies and mice.

In many ways, Wendy had to admit, her brother was not a _nice_ young man.

Then as the whine increased to a skull-splitting volume, Wendy's ears zinged, and she had the bizarre impression of moving forward at tremendous speed while standing still in the exact same place.

And next—everything just . . . stopped. The whine growled down and ceased, the glow vanished, and there stood Fiddleford and Ford, Ford with his hand on the computer keyboard. Her eyes had been dazzled by the light, like coming into a room after having been out on a bright sunshiny day with heavy snow cover and wondering why the lights weren't on until realizing they were—the darkness lay in her vision, not in the basement lab.

"What—what?" Wendy asked before gagging. She felt like puking, but she took a deep breath and rode out the feeling. "What's wrong?"

"Sorry, sorry," Ford said. "Fiddleford asked me something, and I realized we haven't made full preparations. How do you feel?"

"Like I'm about to take this damn axe to somebody!" Wendy snapped, brandishing it. "What went wrong? That nearly turned me inside out!"

"Elevation," Fiddleford explained. He turned and started to look up information on the same computer Wendy had used. "I just happened to think about it, and Ford said he'd plumb overlooked it. See, we didn't account for the two sites' relative elevations. Winnemunka is at, lessee, 313.944 meters above mean sea level, and right here we're at 1150.52—"

Ford interrupted him: "No, ours is 1102.766 meters, if you take into account our depth beneath the surface."

Nodding, Fiddleford said, "So we woulda sent you about 779 meters too high. That's about, uh, 2,557 feet up in the air. You wouldn't actual have fell your own self, just your astral projection, but—"

Holding up a finger, Ford said, "But there's an old superstition that if you fall in a dream and don't awaken until you hit, you die for real. Who knows if that's true? It just _may_ be, and we don't dare take that chance. I've adjusted for elevation now. Are you ready to go again?"

Wendy had to strain to keep from shouting. "Dr. P, I've_ been_ ready! Fix the meters or whatever and send me already!"

Ford nodded and threw a switch, then poised his six-fingered hand over the keyboard. "Same instructions as before. This time I'm going to boost the power. The first time we tried, the projection had just initiated before I cut it off, so hang on—this may be rough."

Again with the zinging hornets and the ant-creepy feeling and the dizziness and the clenching of the jaw. Again with the feeling of suffocation and then the swirling of the cloudy white and peach-colored lights around her, faster and faster. The speed and the standing still at the same time—it all happened again, and she thought, _I'm never gonna travel this way again unless Dipper's life is in jeopardy. _

_Or one of your kids' lives._

"What? Who said that?" She thought she spoke out loud, but couldn't hear the sound of her own voice. Something a blurred reddish color kept whirling past her, no, not one but two vague forms, like autumn leaves in a whirlwind. Two childish voices in unison sang out, "Hi, mo-o-om!"

Or maybe the voices were in her mind.

_Too weird. I'm not ready for that! Jeeze, just get me through this!_

Then up ahead, if distances had meaning any longer, something blotched and dark took—not form, it had no form, but emerged from the light. Unlike the other colors, this hung in one place. She thought of hornets again. It looked like a lumpish, nearly spherical hornet nest.

As for herself, Wendy held up her hand and looked at it. Perfectly normal hand except she could see through it. It was transparent. All except her engagement ring. That looked so real she took comfort from it. The diamond, or the rhidicollite, or whatever it was, burned like a nova. It filled her with confidence, if not peace. Oh, yeah.

"O-kay. Let's go kick some astral," she told herself, and she, or her projection, or something, strode purposely forward and into the darkness, and the axe in her hands felt nice and solid and sharp, as if it meant business.

* * *

In the hallway, Agent Hazard hit the transmit button. "Sir! The shape is pulsating as well as spinning, bulging as if it's on the verge of bursting apart—and I see glimmers of sort of rosy-white light, like flashes that are caught up in it, uh, hard to describe—imagine a tornado that's swept up old-fashioned cameras with flashbulbs, and they keep going off—"

"Hold your fire, Agent Hazard." The Chief's voice. "We're trying to project into the phenomenon to reach Agent Pines and the girl. Be ready for anything, but be sure of your target. Whatever you need to take down won't look human."

"Yes, sir!"

She gripped the butt of her quantum destabilizer and found it slippery. She cursed whatever was powering that vortex. It had been a long time since anything she'd faced on the job had broken a sweat from her.

"Come on, come on, you devil," she whispered. "Let me see your ugly feckin' face."

* * *

"Now what?" asked Eloise, who stood just behind Dipper. He had an arm out as if to shield her. Ahead of them, the creature that had formed from the writhing maggots looked like nothing from the Earth. He recalled the Shapeshifter's natural form. This was at least as bad. No, looking at it, he decided it was worse.

Goat-legged, with those strange backward knees and pebbled dark-purple skin spiked with thorn-like spines, it stood eight feet tall on three-toed feet, each toe armed with a nasty curved scythe of a claw. Above hips improbably narrow for those legs, sprouting black hair that curled and wriggled as if each hair were a tentacle, stretched a long torso that looked like the rib-cage of an emaciated, enormously tall man, the skin barely hiding the ribs, two three-fingered, clawed hands on the ends of super-long, triple-jointed arms swung, likewise decorated with sharp-looking, backward-pointing spines. Topping the torso on a segmented neck was a head that opened in an umbrella-unfolding way, like some gigantic, three-lobed carnivorous flower, the nubbled inside sickly pink and glistening with saliva and writhing with yellow-white tentacles behind inward-facing curves of teeth—no eyes that Dipper could see, no ears, just the head that split open into that deadly blossom.

When it exhaled, its breath showed as puffs of dark cloud. And it breathed through that three-lobed mouth, its breath stinking like rotting fish.

Behind it, a long, flexible tail lashed. It never stopped moving, but Dipper thought it bore a spine at the tip. Probably venomous.

It did not like his flashlight and kept trying to feint away from it. And the worst thing was, when the light hit the creature, lumpy masses under its skin stirred, bulged, and moved.

Dipper felt sick when he recognized what they were. Faces. Human faces, teen faces, the blank-eyed expressions those of the damned, the mindless, the desolated, those lost so deep in despair that they could never rise out of it.

_It's stuffed full of the souls it's claimed!_

But Dipper tore his fascinated gaze away from the creature as Eloise pointed.

A small bloom of light had burst into the room, a few feet off the floor and growing brighter by the second.

The Emolemental reared back and hissed. It did not like that light, either, just as it seemed repelled by Dipper's pocket flashlight.

As Dipper stared, the roots against the wall cracked and some fell. More light streamed in. He heard regular crunches—something was breaking away the gnarls of roots, or cutting into them. The broken ends splatted to the floor, and the cut pieces clinging to the wall bled black blood.

"What's going on?" Eloise yelled, and Dipper realized that the monster had started howling, a howl that no wolf born on Earth could make, an utterly alien sound, hollow and sharp and rising, rising, rising in volume. It was a challenge, a warning. It staked the thing's territory and said _My territory is everywhere!_

_Ching! Crack!_

Hardly daring to hope, Dipper said, "I think somebody's trying to cut their way in here. Someone who's good with an axe!"

* * *

Agent Hazard reported again: "Sir, the rotation's stopped. About a quarter of the surface is glowing now—that rose-and-white light. The black part seems to be trying to draw it in, to absorb it—but the readings on my detector are swinging wildly. I think the thing's about to rip itself apart. Advise?"

"Same as before, stand your ground and be prepared for anything!" Ford barked.

* * *

"Is it a-holding?" Fiddleford yelled over the scream of the machinery. Inside the glare, on the pad, within the dome of white light—so bright that it blurred her in the two men's vision—Wendy had sunk to hands and knees, and she seemed to be moving, her shoulders and arms flexing.

"Holding so far!" Ford said. "I wouldn't dare put more energy in, though."

"Would it hurt Wendy?"

Ford thought about that. "I would judge so. It might very well vaporize anything within a three-mile radius. Let's hope I don't have to try it. I wish I knew what was going on with her!"

* * *

And in the null-space, Wendy's projection—now seeming solid to itself, and to her real self back inside the dome of light—swung and hacked and made headway. The barrier of roots—she couldn't identify them, which meant they were strange indeed—had opened, a jagged hole a couple of feet in diameter. She might crawl through, but she didn't want to touch those black blood-drooling things, and she didn't intend to emerge on hands and knees. She angled around and found an enormous taproot and chopped into that. It screamed in her head, if not in her ears, and she grinned fiercely and chopped again and again. And when it fell, its fall opened up a space big enough to leap through.

She did, yelling, "Dipper!"

"Here! Thank God! Wendy! Look out for that thing—"

The misshapen purple form lumbered close and swiped a clawed hand at her, and she twirled away from it. The tail struck at her, she ducked, the spine lodged in the roots—and she chopped it off near the tip. The thing thrashed, spraying smoking black blood. The monstrous head opened and screamed.

Dipper fought back with—what, a _flashlight_?

Whatever, the beam hit the thing and it hunched, cowering away from Wendy, letting her get past it—

* * *

The cloud of darkness became transparent.

Outside, in the hallway, Agent Hazard said, "I see it! Now!"

And she fired the quantum destabilizer.

Unfortunately.


	18. Chapter 18

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 18: Unintended Consequences**

**(October 1, 2016)**

First: Agent Hazard was the best shot in her division. No one, least of all Hazard, would expect her to miss a target so close to her.

Second: She did _not_ miss the target. In fact, she made a classic kill shot—for most categories of creature.

Third: It _was_ the correct target.

The shot did not injure any of the humans that had been inside the dark, swirling cloud. That was a plus.

So far, so good—

But let's understand a few specifics regarding what she had done. First, the beam of the pistol version of the quantum destabilizer projected a gradually expanding cone of quantumized multiphasic plasmoid energy (only Stanford Pines and, just possibly, Fiddleford McGucket understood exactly what that meant, and if you believe you know, odds are heavily against your being correct). For now, it's best to regard it as something that Scotty said regarding the warp drive in any of the _Star Trek _versions.

In other words, technobabble powered the thing.

At the muzzle, the beam—no, the particle package—even I don't know, but whatever it was—emerged at almost exactly the diameter of a .50 caliber slug.

Show of hands, how big is that? No, not half an inch. No, not fifty millimeters.

What? Who said that? No, most of those are much larger in diameter, thank you, Mr. Smart Guy.

A .50 caliber round is 0.510 inches in diameter, or 12.95 millimeters. Somewhat smaller in diameter than an American dime (.705 in or 17.91 mm), the packet expands as it travels (though I should point out that due to a bizarre paradox that the device uses, it moves at a tiny fraction more than the speed of light, so to any observer it looks like a beam or ray). At thirty yards, it has tripled in size and the damage is done by a force that will punch a hole in anything man-made. Anything.

On the other hand, if there's anything _natural_ that won't be perforated, Stanford has yet to discover it. The initial damage at that range is basically an inch-and-a-half in diameter hole.

But that's not where it ends. The interaction of the technobabble energy continued expanding outward through the target from the hole, consuming the target from point of impact outwards. And what is more, the little gun's ray (you might as well call it ray*) does not stop at the target. Far from it.

Literally far from it.

Oh, how that little old quantum plasma packet does travel on, for much of the distance losing but little of its punch, for roughly about three miles.

The one shot that Agent Hazard got off pierced the monstrous manifestation in mid-thorax, right, which set up a rapid decomposition of the material and spectral components of its being.

Then further down the hall, the ray blasted a roughly four-inch hole in both sides of a concrete-block wall, passed through a locker containing the tuba of the Screaming Eagles Red Screamers marching band bass horn player, Marty "Tubby" Tagart. It also completely destroyed the tuba (though the decomposing effect did not occur in mineral or most plant-based organic materials, it loved metals, and it ate that tuba the way a starving cat will polish off a tuna dinner), much to Marty's secret relief. He had always hated the instrument, hated the nickname it hung on him, and hated playing in the band.

In days to come, the school officials explained the damage as a freak lightning bolt strike (it rained some in Winnemunka late that night), and thankfully, Marty's grandmother was a Fundamentalist who declared, "If God hates tubas, I say let Marty drop out of the band! Better he not play than be wrapped up in the horn of the devil himself!"

Marty's dad always gave in to his mother's demands in every respect but for one: over the years, he had become perhaps North America's most devout atheist. In secret.

But at least Marty was happy.

It's an ill quantum destablilizer that blasts no one any good.

Where were we? The packet punched another hole through the far wall of the band room, a little larger than the first, and then sailed out into the wide world to wreak havoc, but Minnesota being a very flat state, it found nothing much to wreak it on before it had covered more than two and three-quarters miles, had grown to be about three feet in diameter, and had so dissipated that the worst it could do (at a range of four miles) was give a random cow a bad hot flash. She was OK, though the farmer did wonder why, when the next day he milked her, buttermilk came out.

This is fascinating, but your eyes are glazing over, so let's go back to the moment of the shot, shall we?

Eloise Niedermeyer had been shoved back forcefully by Dipper, keeping her safe from the monster's wildly slashing claws, and she lay on her back near the wall, propped on her elbows, her face frozen in a mask of fear.

Wendy Corduroy had already severed the tip of the monster's tail and one of the creature's fingers on its left, um, hand, let's suppose, must be a hand, it's on the end of the arm, and Wendy stood bending backwards, away from a swipe that had almost eviscerated her, with her spine arched way back and blade poised to bisect the thing's weird head when she could get in a downstroke.

Dipper Pines, though no football player, had tackled the creature's left foot and lay on the floor, arms wrapped around the ankle, trying to trip it.

And the kneeling Agent Hazard sent a blast of quantumized energy-ma-whatchacallit (Fiddleford's preferred term) right through the hideous thing. It bellowed, and, beginning to crumble into flying orange-red sparks, slashed hard at Wendy and then fell to all fours and in four-foot drive mode, charged toward Hazard, who got to her feet and had time for one more shot.

She made it count. Though the thing's head was barely attached to the body now—the effect of the destabilizer was making the thing break into a thousand flaring, floating red embers that sparkled and then fizzed to nothing—Hazard coolly thrust the gun down what she assumed to be the thing's gullet and before it could bite, she reamed it from mouth to its rear exit. It jerked away, burning from the inside out, crumbling, thrashing, either dying or doing the emolental equivalent thereof.

It dwindled down to a pathetic withered remnant, a kind of mummy of a small kid—small for high school, five feet tall if that, fifty pounds if that, naked, cadaverous, almost skeletal—hunkered on its side, grasping its knees in a fetal position on the floor (never mind that the floor nearby now had a deep, slanting, smoking hole in it from her second shot). The figure was ugly, repulsive, and yet human. Its head had only random locks and stubble. Its ears were mere rags of flesh. Its eyes shone large, black, gleaming puppy-dog eyes they were, from deep sockets. It had the face of a suffering skull.

"Please," it croaked piteously. "Help me." It reached an imploring hand toward Agent Hazard, who, after all, was a woman. And it grinned in a hideous, knowing way.

"Sure thing, kid," she said, and she splashed it with about a pint of consecrated water, which dissolved it about as readily as a bowl full of concentrated sulfuric acid would dissolve a live goldfish.

PLEASE don't try that at home.

It melted instantly to steaming, inert sludge. Hazard strode past it. "Pines! You OK?"

Dipper knelt over Wendy, who had fallen onto her back, knees bent in what looked like a painful position. Her left arm just . . . ended some inches below the elbow. No blood, odd. Her severed hand lay a little distance from the stump.

And she was fading. Literally—Agent Hazard could see right through her. Wendy reached up her remaining hand and touched Dipper's face, smiled, and . . . vanished.

"How did she get here?" asked Hazard.

"I don't know," Dipper choked out. He glared at her. "Why'd you even _do_ that? Why'd you shoot it? We were _winning_!"

"Standing orders. Civilians were in danger from a paranormal creature, I had a clear shot, so I took it," Hazard said. "Eloise. Eloise! You OK?"

Eloise shrank away from the woman in black. Her mouth worked, but she couldn't manage to say anything. Her eyes were wild. Dipper picked two things up from the floor. One was an axe.

His face, torn by grief, tattered with anger, hinted that with that axe, he might do anything. But as he stood—

A phone went off. And something buzzed.

Hazard tapped her communicator button, and Dipper reflexively grabbed his phone. "Chief?" sad Hazard.

"Grunkle Ford!" blurted Dipper, his aching grief in his voice.

"Quick report on the conditions," Stanford snapped. "This is urgent."

"Wendy was here," Dipper said. "I—I think she died!"

"The paranormal threat is resolved," Hazard said. "Condition Omega."

Omega. Standard Agency code term, one the Chief always wanted to hear at the end of an operation. That meant that the ghost was laid, the place was consecrated, the alien was dead, the Unknown was kaput.

For now.

"Mason!" Stanford yelled. "Listen! Dipper, listen to me! Wendy is _not_ dead! But—she's lost, she's wandering. Or her consciousness is. We have to get her astral body united again with her material one. To do that I need you here, ASAP!"

"Not dead?" Dipper gasped.

Eloise hugged him. They both wept.

Hazard touched his shoulder. "Kid, keep it together."

"Agent Hazard!" Stanford snapped. "I've scrambled a chopper. Expect it in the school parking lot in fifteen minutes. Get Agent Pines on it. This is an Operation Boom, understand?"

"Yes, sir."

Dipper glared at her. He still clutched the axe. He put whatever the other small item was in his jacket pocket.

"I'm going to have to confiscate that," Hazard said gently.

"You try, you get the axe," Dipper said. "The hard way." He was trembling, but he kept thinking, _Wendy would do it for me!_

"Does he—do you have to go?" Eloise asked forlornly, turning from Hazard to Dipper. "I've got so many questions."

Dipper took her hand. "Wendy's my fiancée," he said. "I love her. I have to try to save her. I'll be in touch later, I promise. Right now—you'll drop her off at her house?"

Hazard nodded. "With her bike."

Dipper gulped a deep breath and said, "Then go home, and if your parents ask, you had a really dull day." He gently kissed her forehead. "Don't worry. You're gonna be all right. Look—you know how all this monster crap sprang up. You—you see that from now on this school has—that it brings people good memories for a change!" Though he meant to be encouraging, he sounded fierce. "Make it a place where kids build something together instead of tearing each other apart. Where they leave with good memories, not relief! Find the best teachers, the most sympathetic ones, and work with them. Get the best of your classmates with you. If there has to be a school spirit, make it a decent one!"

"Come on, kids," Hazard said, again sounding gentle. "We don't have a hell of a lot of time."

She stopped briefly to tell Kamfer that she and one of her partners had to have words with him, and he nervously agreed to stay put in the office when she smilingly told him, "I'm afraid I can't guarantee your safety otherwise."

The chopper was already in the air, dropping down as it approached the school from the north. It whickered down to a landing, sending a blast of wind over the parking lot. Hazard pointed a finger and said, "Stay right there!" to Eloise, and she put her hand on Dipper's back. "Let's go!"

She shoved him toward the helicopter. They ran, ducking even though the blades spun well above their heads. The lone pilot leaned toward them and shouted, "Two?"

Hazard yelled, "Just him! Get in, belt up, Pines. You've got your orders, Lieutenant?"

"Drop him off at the old Paisley Field," said the chopper pilot. "But nobody uses it—"

"Just do it. Fast as you can get him there!"

"Roger. Ready, guy? Move away, Ma'am. Here we go!"

* * *

Dipper had never been aboard a helicopter before. He rode in the Plexiglas bubble beside the pilot thinking it should be exciting, but really he could only think about Wendy.

As helicopters go, this one wasn't huge—an MH-6 Little Bird—and it reminded him of the ones he'd seen when his dad watched reruns of that old TV show _M*A*S*H_. The one thing he later remembered noticing was that the chopper had the insignia of the Minnesota Air National Guard on the fuselage: red, white and blue (of course) with a Revolutionary War Minuteman holding his musket, and in the background two dart-like fighter jets ascending.

They flew low, and the ground beneath seemed to flow past like a river in flood, so he couldn't focus on anything fgor long. The chopper was moving faster than any car could.

_But Wendy didn't have all that much time—_

"How fast?" Dipper yelled to the pilot.

"A hundred fifty-five," he thought the pilot yelled back. "Not far now. Ten minutes."

_But how much time does Wendy have?_

In fact, in a little less than nine minutes the Lieutenant set Dipper down on a runway that looked dilapidated and abandoned—cracked concrete looking weathered in the morning sunshine, deteriorating control tower, a crowd of creaking, complaining starlings perched in the rusted, empty window frames. The pilot threw him a salute. "Move away now. Good luck, kid!"

And as soon as Dipper backed off, the Little Bird rose and chattered away toward a cloud bank gathering in the west, leaving him standing there listening to the quarreling birds and wondering what was going to happen next.


	19. Chapter 19

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**Chapter 19: West with the Sun**

**(October 1, 2016)**

The helicopter had no sooner droned out of sight before from the abandoned tower a loudspeaker boomed: "STEP OFF THE RUNWAY ONTO THE GRASS!" The starlings erupted into the sky, squawking and rapidly winging their way overhead. A random splat caught Dipper on the shoulder, leaving a white streak down the shoulder of his suit coat.

At that point he didn't care. He hopped back onto the grassy verge and noticed that for an abandoned airfield, Paisley's grass was relatively well-kept. High, but not wildly sprouting. But how could anything other than a helicopter take off here? The runway looked badly cracked, with weeds showing through—

A deep, throbbing hum of machinery rose, and about sixty square feet of the nearer end of the runway dropped down maybe ten feet and then slipped forward and out of sight. A moment later, something gray and sleek rose out of the earth on a platform that replaced the concrete. It was . . . an airplane, certainly, not even as large as the one that Hazard had piloted. It sat on the replacement area of concrete, which locked into place with a reverberating clank.

It looked like a dart, slim, sleek nose, sharply swept-back and stubby wings. For a second he stared at it, then he heard someone yelling his name.

A ground crewman in windbreaker and wearing goggles beckoned Dipper around to the left side of the aircraft. He—no, up close, she—had pushed a rolling stair against the side of the craft. "Up and in, Pines," she said. "Don't fall. Swing your right leg over, get it on the deck, then step in and sit down, buckle in. Headset is on the seat, though, don't sit on it. Soon as you're strapped in, put it on and wait for instructions. Go, go, go!"

He hurried up. Whoa. It was not exactly a passenger jet. The pilot sat up front in the cockpit, and Dipper clambered into a seat directly behind him—or her. Whoever it was wore a helmet. Dipper picked up the headset, noise-canceling earphones and a microphone on a curved stem, and sat down and buckled up. And became aware that the bird mess smelled bad, but he couldn't reach his handkerchief, so—

He got the headphones on.

"Pines?"

"Uh, yeah. Yes, sir," he said. The voice sounded male.

"This is going to feel rough, but hang in there. I'll set you down close to Gravity Falls in . . . seventy minutes from now."

"What?" The cockpit canopy slipped forward just over his head. The glass looked thick. It latched with a snap he could hear even through the headphones.

Dipper's mind spun. Seventy minutes to go 1500 miles? That was like—"Mach 2?" he asked.

"Pretty close. I heard you were smart. Checklist complete. Cockpit secure. We'll hit forty thousand feet in about ten minutes, and then when I give you the word, hang on. The boom won't bother you, but—" the pilot left the sentence incomplete.

Dipper heard him speaking to—someone, probably whoever was the ground controller. Then he said, "We're cleared for takeoff. Here we go."

The ground acceleration was greater than anything Dipper had experienced. He gripped the armrests as a gigantic invisible hand pressed him back against the seat. The scenery flashed by, the nose tilted, and they were off. Even with the noise canceling headphones on, Dipper heard the ferocious yowl of the engines.

He felt as if they tilted nearly vertical, and the inclination probably did reach seventy-five degrees. The ground fell away and vanished beneath white clouds. The horizon bent into a visible curve. Then the pilot's voice came on the headset: "You doing OK, Pines?"

"OK," he said. "We're going supersonic, huh?"

"In ten seconds . . . grab hold . . . five, four, three, two, one—"

Dipper couldn't even see, because a sudden violent vibration shook him so that his eyes blurred and his teeth chattered. He gasped for breath. The gee forces climbed, and he wondered _How can the pilot still steer with this going on?_

Then the vibration stopped, and for a moment it seemed as if everything went silent. No, there was the roar of the engine. They still ascended at a sharp tilt. Outside the curvature of the Earth was quite apparent.

"Still with me?" the pilot asked.

"Still here. What's going on now?" Dipper asked.

"We're climbing to 65,000 feet. We're ballistic now, kid. For a while I'm gonna be payload, not pilot. This flight's gonna seem real short to you—not long before we nose down again. We're at Mach 2.2. Hey, you need to pee?"

"Um—no."

"That's good, because we were supposed to tell you to go before you boarded. Hope that's not all we forgot. Hold it for another forty minutes, and you're good. Oh, you know that bit about emergency oxygen and all you hear on domestics?"

"Yeah."

"Forget it. In the event of an emergency, we're both dead. So just relax and enjoy."

_Easy for him to say_.

As the pilot had advised, the plane very soon leveled for a short spell, then nosed downward. Dipper couldn't really see much through the cockpit canopy—the deep blue of the sky, the blurred, curving horizon, and an expanse of smeary greens and browns through a heavy layer of cloud and haze far below.

Before long, the pilot said, "OK, I'm flying this bird again. We've just been cleared for landing. Here's the thing, kid: once we're on the ground, we can't let you know exactly where we are. So once you're off the field, we're gonna blindfold you, OK? Just to keep the location secret. We'll put you into a fast car, it'll take you to a rendezvous point, and then you can take off the blindfold and your ride home will meet you. Hey, you enjoy the flight?"

_At least it nearly took my mind off Wendy. _"Piece of cake," Dipper said.

The pilot laughed. "Oh, you can pee as soon as we land. Either in the can or in the grass, depending on how desperate you are."

A few minutes later, he announced, "Final approach."

They descended not quite as abruptly as they had climbed. The ground came up to meet them, and Dipper saw below a long strip of concrete. Then he sat back, took a deep breath, and felt the jolt as the plane's landing gear touched down. The pilot reversed the engines, making him strain forward against the seat belt and brace himself on the armrests. Then the plane gradually rumbled to a stop.

"Pleasure having you aboard, kid," the pilot said. "Remember Top Secret Airlines for all your supersonic flight needs. Out the same side and the same way you came in, and on the ladder somebody'll help you if you're a little shaky."

Dipper took off the headset. The cockpit retracted with a hiss, Dipper heard the clang as the stair contacted the side of the plane, and a moment later two hooks secured it. A voice outside, another guy, said, "Stand up, swing your left leg over, and then just climb down. Keep a firm grip on the handholds. Slow, let me guide your foot. There you go."

He climbed down, gripping both rails, and realized for the first time that he'd been scared. "This way," the guy in the ground-crew uniform said. He led Dipper to a kind of dugout at the edge of the concrete, which looked just as worn and cracked as Paisley Field had, until Dipper realized that the cracks and patches of weeds straggling through them were _trompe-l'œil_ paintings, not three-dimensional. Camouflage, he decided.

The crewman showed him to a tiny toilet, where he did what the pilot had suggested and then scrubbed at the drying bird doo with a wet paper towel, removing at least some of it. When he came out, the crewman held out something and said, "Have to wear this, sorry."

It wasn't just a blindfold, it was a black bag that the guy pulled over his head. Then he said, "Hold my arm. Just go with me. We're heading up a ramp now." Dipper didn't see, but felt and could smell, the outdoors. The guy was still talking: "Another two steps and we're on the level ground. Just over here—wait a minute, I have to open a gate. Here we go. Ma'am, this is the passenger for Gravity Falls."

"I'll take over." It was a woman, not Hazard, but someone a few years older, and, judging from her accent, from somewhere in the South. "Here, take my hand. Watch it, the grass is pretty thick. OK, here's the car. Let me help you in. This is the backseat—dark-tinted windows so no one can get a look and think you're a kidnap victim. Seatbelt here, strap in. Good."

He heard the car door slam, then the front door open and a moment later close again. The snick of a seatbelt. The engine started. "First time in a car while blindfolded," the driver said, as if it were not a question.

"Actually, no," Dipper said.

The driver didn't make another remark. The car started forward, gained speed, and after a sort distance a siren blared, and they really tore along. When the car braked, the driver said, "Here's where you change rides. Any questions?"

"What time is it?" Dipper asked.

"Um—0957."

For a moment, Dipper felt his heart sink. That meant that in Winnemunka it was close to noon. And time was important.

"Take off the bag," the woman said, opening the door. "Here he is."

He pulled the blindfold off and saw his driver was a tall, sharp-featured African-American woman of forty or so. She jerked her head toward someone and smiled.

"Lookin' sharp, knucklehead," rasped a voice.

"Grunkle Stan?" With the bag off, Dipper blinked in the diffuse light of a cloudy day.

His great-uncle, in his black Mr. Mystery suit but without the fez or eyepatch, grinned at him. "Right this way," he said. He opened the passenger door of a police car and put Dipper in the shotgun position.

Someone in the back seat said, "This is highly irregular."

A higher voice said, "But fun! I never rode back here before!"

"Durland, you are a delight," the first voice said.

Huh. The sheriff of Roadkill County and his right-hand dummy were riding in the back, like a couple of criminals. Sheriff Blubs said, "Now, Stanley, the way you switch on the lightbar and the siren—"

Stan switched both on. "You don't hafta tell me. This ain't my first rodeo."

"Are we goin' to the rodeo?" Durland asked, excited. "Whoo-ee! We're gonna be a couple of bronco-bustin' purple traitors!"

"Ain't he adorable?" Blubs asked.

"Matter of opinion. Here we go!"

Dipper realized they had been parked at the Attlee Bridge pull-off, where boat owners launched their outboards on the Little Copper River, only three miles from the entrance to the valley. They covered it in less than three minutes, then blasted through town at ninety miles per hour. When Stan parked in front of the Shack, he opened the rear door to let Blubs out, said, "Key's in the ignition. You might wanna check the suspension, it's a little mushy. Thanks for the ride, boys!"

"Thank_ you_!" Blubs said.

As he got out of the back seat, Durland asked in a disappointed voice, "Where are all the horsies at?"

Stan all but ran with Dipper into the Shack. Only a few customers milled around in the gift shop. Stan quickly called out, "Hey, folks! If you go outside real quick and look up the trail, there's a real live centaur browsin' on the bushes. Better grab some pictures, these babies are rare!"

The seven customers hustled out, having been pre-hustled, so to speak, and Stan punched in the code on the vending machine. "Third level down, Dip," he said. "Sixer's secret lab that he don't think I know about. Good luck, kid."

Dipper nodded, ran down the steps two at a time as Stan closed the secret door behind him, pushed the button for the elevator, and when the doors open, he jumped in, pressed the secret combo code for Stanford's exclusive portion of the lowest level, and waited facing the doors, breathing hard, both wondering and dreading what he was about to see.


	20. Chapter 20

**Ghost Consultant**

* * *

**20: True, He Is No Prince Charming**

**(October 1, 2016, and various dates thereafter)**

"Don't approach her yet!" Stanford ordered as Dipper began to move toward the pad and toward the still figure of Wendy, lying on her right side. He stopped just outside the energy field.

"Is she going to be OK?" Dipper asked.

Fiddleford put his hand on the teen's shoulder. "Maybe, son. We're gonna try our ding-dangdest. Ford, fill him in. I'll get the equipment ready."

What Stanford had to tell him sounded an awful lot as if he were speaking about interdimensional travel, except he wasn't quite. Wendy's sleeping body was inside the energy field, lying on the pad—but her essence, her soul, almost, was out there somewhere unable to find its way back.

"The negative field at the other end collapsed when the entity, the emolental, was shot," Stanford said. "That broke our connection. Now we need something, a beacon, some directional signal so she can find her way back. I'm hoping you can do that. You'll need to get inside the field. I'm going to ramp the power far down—even then it's not 100 percent safe for you—but if I turn it off, I honestly don't know what might happen to Wendy—"

"Grunkle Ford," Dipper said, "Don't tell me the technology. Just do it. And let me know what you want me to do."

"Talk to her," Fiddleford said. "Touch her face. Use your thought-transfer on her, if it's even a-workin'. Let her know you're with her. It ain't strictly scientifical, but it's all we got."

"That axe," Stanford said. Doesn't she—"

They peered through the foggy white light at Wendy. Yes, she lay with her axe—the identical axe that Dipper held—beside her.

"How kin it be in two places at once?" asked Fiddleford.

"It's a special axe," Dipper said. "This was her ancestor Archibald Corduroy's axe. It's been both in the material world and in the afterlife."

"Remarkable," Stanford murmured. "You might be holding the physical manifestation, she the phantasmic one—or more likely, vice-versa—"

"Ford," Fiddleford said quietly, "time's a-wastin'."

"You're right, of course," Ford said, adjusting something. "Mason, I'm taking the energy level down to twenty per cent—that's as low as I dare. I want you to leap through it. Be sure you don't hit Wendy, though. Try to, what is the saying, stick the landing so no part of your body is outside the limits of the floor pad. As soon as you're in, I'll go to full power again. You may feel disoriented."

Dipper got as close to the field as possible. There was room on the pad for two—but he'd have to make sure he landed at least a foot away from Wendy to avoid hurting her.

"You're a-takin' the axe?" Fiddleford asked.

"Let him!" Stanford said. "An item from her life with him might be the feather that balances the scale. Mason, get ready. In five, four, three, two, one—jump!"

Dipper leaped, and the instant he penetrated the energy flow, he lost all sense of direction and balance. He might have jumped off the edge of the Grand Canyon—it seemed forever before he hit the pad. He came down on one knee and one heel, threw out the hand that did not clutch an axe, and steadied himself until his head stopped spinning.

Gasping for air, he turned the axe he held until its position matched that of the axe beside Wendy. Then he put the one down, carefully, exactly on top, and then there was one axe. The two had merged.

"Wendy," he said.

He was only vaguely aware that the energy field surrounding the pad had intensified. All he could see was his beautiful Lumberjack Girl, lying on her side, her expression peaceful but terribly blank.

Because the world was whirling crazily around him, he carefully balanced on both hands, leaned down, and kissed her. She didn't respond. "Should have brought some peppermint," he mumbled.

Closing his eyes helped a little. When his head steadied, and when the full-body itching had subsided a bit, he opened them again. He took Wendy's left hand—still attached, thank God!—and held it tight, reaching out to her with his mind:

—_Wendy, here I am. Come back to me, please. Please come back!_

He couldn't find her. Her hand was warm but unresponsive. When he squeezed it, she did not react, and she didn't answer him telepathically.

But from beyond the boundary of light, he heard his great-uncle's voice: "Put yourself in the Mindscape! I've seen visions of the dead while there. If she's wandering on the astral plane, that might be a way to reach her!"

Dipper couldn't remember doing anything harder than that. To enter the Mindscape, he had to clear his mind, find a point of deep relaxation, and let his consciousness sink easily into the distorted reflection of reality that made up that strange dreamlike realm.

The key was calm. How could he be calm when Wendy might be—anywhere?

He had to try. Still holding her hand, he bent his head and slowed his breathing. Once or twice he started to descend into the Mindscape, but—he pulled himself back, afraid of what he might find, or not find.

It was like the time back in the late summer at the lake, when Wendy had given him a few swimming lessons and he was doing better, finally. She decided, "Time for you to learn to dive, Dip!"

Mabel did it, Teek did it, Wendy did it: Stand on the floating platform a few dozen yards offshore, crouch with knees bent and head forward, swing the arms back, bring them forward, and jump into a low arching trajectory.

He froze with his toes curled over the edge of the float, irrationally afraid of throwing himself headfirst in the water. He tried, balked, tried again, balked again. Wendy climbed up the ladder and stood beside him, gently coaching him. "It won't hurt you, dude," she said quietly.

Some kids off on the shore noticed and started to laugh. Biting his lip, Dipper had taken a deep breath, swung his arms, and gone flat into the water, a real belly-buster. Wendy pulled him out and helped him back on the float. "Not too good, man," she said. "Hurt much?"

"Mostly my pride," he'd said.

"OK, only one thing to do. Get ready to try it again. This time, don't_ fall_ into the water—you gotta push with those legs. Jump!"

He wanted to give up, but having a streak of Pines stubbornness, he kept at it until he learned how to do that arch, let his hands part the water, and slip painlessly beneath the surface.

It had been a hard lesson to learn.

Now after six tries, he did the same thing and finally relaxed enough to respond to his own autosuggestion. Though his eyes were closed, he opened them, metaphorically speaking, in the black-and-white-and-sepia world of the Mindscape.

As usual, it was as quiet as—huh. He couldn't think of anything quieter! He was still in the lab, or a distorted version of the lab, a lab designed by Escher with furniture by Dali. He couldn't see Ford or Fiddleford. Or . . . Wendy.

He concentrated, swiveling his attention like the beam of a lighthouse, three hundred and sixty degrees. No Wendy. No anybody.

_OK, OK, physically she was 1500 miles away. I can imagine that I can see that far. Better than eagle eyes. Here we go._

Imagining that he had the gift of telescopic vision, able to see through the curvature of the Earth even, he turned slowly—in his mind—searching. _Eagle eyes. Screaming Red Eagles, whatever it was—which way, which way_?

Then, like an anxious radar operator leaning over his scope, he felt it. He was looking in exactly the right direction.

Except all he could see was darkness.

* * *

Wendy was far away, lost in a kind of charcoal-colored fog. She vaguely remembered touching Dipper's face and then he was gone, and she lay on a surface that felt like dirt but looked like a tile floor, and she found her hand laying there and picked it up and put _it back on—_

_Crazy, man. But it stuck._ She flexed the fingers of her left hand—her astral left hand, she supposed. They worked, and she felt no pain. What bothered her was that something was missing. Wendy scanned the floor all around. She couldn't find it, though—she knew she had dropped it when that creature had slashed her arm, but it wasn't anywhere around. _Can't go home without it. Gotta be around here._

The monster was gone, at least—but to Wendy's vision, the school hallways and classrooms still looked like something out of a teen horror movie, angles wrong, darkness lurking in corners, the smell of rot in the air, squishy-looking things the size of grapefruit scuttling over the ceiling and fleeing from her as she moved through the place.

_Dip killed the Big Bad,_ she guessed, _but all the little nasty thoughts and fears still haunt this place._

High school. Man, she was glad she was out of that mess.

What bothered her, what worried her—

_Come on, Corduroy, you can admit it to yourself. What scares me is that I can't find Dipper!_

She knew he wouldn't leave without her.

But—

_Is this me? Am I still back in Dr. P's lab? Man, I could use some of Dipper's smarts right about now!_

Maybe if she could find her way out of this damn place, she thought. She knew the trick of navigating the most confusing maze—put your hand on one wall and keep trailing it along as you go. Follow one wall as long as it takes, and sooner or later, you're out.

She met a ghost—the girl in tattered old-fashioned clothes, gaunt, ash-pale, with black hair falling in her eyes. "You can go now," Wendy told her. "The monster's dead."

The head bowed, and the ghost vanished without a word.

_Huh. Who'd've thought it would be easy?_

She found a few others and with soft words, released them. Or maybe they just didn't like her company and vanished. None of them seemed frightening to her, or even scary-looking, really. More like lost souls. Anyhow, they went away.

Just as she was on the verge of giving up, Wendy reached the lobby. The clock on the wall hung warped and weird, but it showed the swooping eagle with outstretched claws. Only the clock had no hands. No time like the present. In fact, no time at all.

"Well," she told it, "I'm goin' outside, I guess. Can't be worse than here."

The painted eagle turned its head until it faced her—eagle eyes face forward, giving them binocular vision and a scowl like a four-year-old told she had to go to bed early—and said, "He's looking for you."

"Sorry, I don't take advice from birds," she said. "But thanks for trying."

She found the front doors all locked. And it looked like police tape might have been strung around the building.

So what. She was in her astral body. She melted through the glass and the tape, which moved as if the gentlest breeze had stirred it.

Through the fog, she could see official-looking cars parked around the front of the portico, and men and women with instruments frozen in mid-stride.

_No time, man._

But in the real world, these guys and girls were moving. Time was passing. She could stay here for eternity—but what if her body died?

"Got to get back," she told herself.

It was way flat here—first thing she noticed.

So she climbed a tree.

* * *

Dipper jerked out of the Mindscape. He reached in his side jacket pocket.

He had picked up her engagement ring, and like the axe, it had not faded when Wendy had.

But—she was wearing her engagement ring.

OK, so his kiss hadn't wakened her.

So he was no Prince Charming.

But maybe—just maybe—

He slipped the ring from his pocket onto the ring finger of her left hand.

Like the axe, it merged with the one already there.

This time Dipper dropped straight back into the Mindscape, and looked in the direction he had before, when he thought he'd felt a trace of Wendy—

* * *

It was a birch, much like those in Oregon, not a huge one, maybe fifty feet tall. If she had been in her material body, it would have bent over and lowered her back to the ground well before she reached the top, but her astral form weighed nothing. Heck, she didn't even need to climb—she could just float up as high as she wanted. Nothing tethered her to the ground. The law of gravity had in her case been repealed.

But she didn't want to feel she was drifting away, like a balloon, so she clung to the very tip of the tree. And she reached out with her feelings and closed her eyes, and looked—

There it was.

The most brilliant star she had ever seen. A long way away. Just a step away. It was like a beacon calling her, and she knew that where it was, there too was Dipper.

"Hang on, dude!" she yelled without a sound.

And like a girl from, oh, Krypton, maybe, she flattened herself and rode the air toward the distant light—

* * *

Dipper felt her approach, left the Mindscape, and sat beside her, lifting her up. Her head lolled back. "Here," he said. "Oh, Wendy, come back! I'm right here!"

He couldn't keep the tears from leaking. He hugged her tightly.

_Here. Here. I'm here!_

He felt the touch of her hand on his cheek.

He opened his eyes and looked into her beautiful green eyes.

"Hey, man," she rasped, her voice hoarse. "Never . . . been kissed . . . by a dude with a beard before."

He kissed her and did not ever want to stop.

* * *

Outside the light—Ford had ramped it up past what he considered the danger zone, perilously close to overload—Ford squinted into the glare and yelled over the electronic roar, "What's he doing? Giving her mouth to mouth resuscitation?"

Fiddleford yelled back, "Oh fer th' love of Mexican jumpy beans, Ford! Git Lorena to explain it to you sometime! Kill the power!"

But, being Ford, he lowered it gradually, fearing unknown effects. Finally Dipper broke away from Wendy, though he didn't stop hugging her, and he gave them a thumbs-up.

Then Ford cut the power. "Wendy! Are you—"

"Think I sprained my wrist," she said as Dipper helped her up. "But I'll do. Hey, man, thanks for comin' to look for me. What was that flare?"

He held her left hand and raised it.

"Ouch!" she said, wincing. "Kinda tender there!"

"It was your ring," he said. "Your axe and your ring somehow stayed behind, but—but they were—I don't know, in two worlds somehow—"

Fiddleford said to Ford, "Didn't I tell ya that the Rhidicollite had phase-shifting properties? It exists in six or eight planes at once, I reckon!"

"And the axe," Ford said, "is part material and part paranormal. Fascinating. Well, we have enough of the Rhidicollite left to do some tests—"

Dipper helped Wendy off the pad. He held her wrist and through their touch-telepathy, he felt the pangs—not like a severed limb, but as if she'd badly wrenched the joint. _–I'm sorry, Wendy. This is probably all my fault. I got us lost in that haunted school—_

'_S OK, Dip. Ford asked me to see if I could help you, and I couldn't say no. I came 'cause I wanted to. 'Cause I love you._

—_I love you, too Wendy. So much._

_Good, we got that straightened out. Now, just one question. Was that the same Eloise you never see in real life?_

* * *

**EPILOGUE: Some Ever Afters**

* * *

From a separate cover note attached to Dipper Pines's Situation Report, October 2, done on an official Agency form:

_Grunkle Ford, I hope I filled all this out correctly. If I didn't, let me know and I'll try to fix it._

_OK, not officially, here's what I think, but I couldn't exactly put it in the right words on the form._

_High school is the closest thing to living in a totalitarian dictatorship most Americans will ever know. You have to go where they tell you when they tell you. You have to ask permission to go to the bathroom, and I've seen people humiliated when the teacher refused permission and they wet themselves right there in class._

_You can't receive an emergency phone call if your parents are hurt, the way that Francine Boone's were last year, and she didn't know until she got called to the principal's office and told by a policeman that she didn't have a dad any longer. They took her away in a police car, and she didn't come back to school again. Rumors are she had a breakdown, but her mom moved away with her and not even her friends know much._

_And if something like that happens, or if you get pushed around by a student or a teacher, it's no good to complain. You can't speak your mind. You don't have any rights. So sometimes kids try to trick teachers into losing their tempers and then video them. It's a way of getting back._

_It's wrong, it's full of hate and resentment._

_That's the way it feels. And the cliques—that was your word, I think, the kids I know call them packs—they're horrible. Like little social fortresses. Like people coming together and building walls and saying we're better than you, keep out, you're scum. It's worse than just sick, Grunkle Ford, it's evil. And high school just encourages that._

_Grunkle Ford, Mabel and I know two girls who have been raped and who are too afraid and ashamed to tell anybody about it! Because they're treated like fair game. Guys treat them like meat, and other girls make fun of them. You know Mabel, how kind she is, but they beg her NOT to help them, because then they'd have to tell what happened. Sick, like I said. And there are nerds like me who get regularly beat up and who can't defend themselves and are too intimidated to ask for help._

_And our school is a GOOD one!_

_What I'm saying is that the place breeds fear and anxiety. No wonder that monster or force or whatever took shape out there, where it had festered for so long. I don't know this stuff the way you do, but I think that all the bad emotions, all the resentments and hatreds and panics and everything, focused on the spirit of some poor student who didn't survive it. And it became the core of the Emolental. Try that track in your research._

_You know, once I thought I wanted to be a teacher. But now that I've lived through three years and a bit of high school, now that I'm a Senior, even though I'm a lucky one, I don't want that any longer. That's something else that high school has taken from me._

_I don't know the answer, but—God, I just hope college will be better._

* * *

Out in Winnemunka, Eloise didn't think she could ever go back to school again—the school remained closed for a week while workmen repaired the damage from the supposed lightning bolt—but then when it re-opened, she did return, fearfully.

And it felt . . . a little better. Cleaner. Maybe the Emolental had been influencing the way people thought and acted. She remembered Dipper's advice and started seeking out kids who seemed more upbeat, more outgoing, more accepting. They started trying to improve the way others felt about school. Started defending the weaker kids. Standing up to a few bullies—together.

It helped.

And doing that, she met Cliff, a kind of average-looking guy, not a jock, not a nerd, but shy and withdrawn. But she liked him. And he liked her. And she told Dipper, "I think I was wrong. There was one senior boy who didn't have a girlfriend. Until now."

But still, she sent off to Western Alliance University for their admissions brochures.

You know, just in case.

* * *

A very jumpy Mr. Kamfer accepted a promotion to Assistant Superintendent of Chestnut County Schools and was out of his office at East Chestnut by November. Mrs. Morris, who replaced him, was not quite so tightly wound. And she was receptive to Eloise and her friends' suggestions for ways of building up morale.

It wasn't a revolution. But it was a small turn for the better.

* * *

Two weeks after the events, in the Western headquarters building of the Agency, Agent Hazard stood at attention across the desk from the Chief, Dr. Pines. "You don't have to do that," he said.

"Do what, sir?" she asked, her eyes rigidly focused on the wall above his head.

He sighed and got up and led her to the sofa. "Here. Sit down, please," he said. She did, and he sat next to her. "Two things," he said. "First, I am not accepting your resignation. The Agency put a lot of money into training you, and I refuse to let the investment go to waste. Second, I am not accepting your Situation Report. You're far too hard on yourself."

"I could have killed those kids, sir," she said softly.

"You let the standing orders override my immediate ones," he said. "Ordinarily, that's the thing to do—an Agent has that discretion, being on the spot instead of miles away. You took a shot when you had it. Yes, you caused collateral damage, but the physical destruction was relatively minor—it did take a remarkable amount of concrete to fill that deep hole in the floor, but aside from that, nothing too severe. Fortunately the two young people who had been trapped inside the phenomenon are remarkably resilient. My great-nephew and his friend have recovered. He, especially, has been through more than you were aware of, and he's a deceptively tough young man."

"The other girl, the redhead, sir—"

"Was never there."

Hazard looked pained. In a choked voice, she asked, "Is she dead?"

"No, she's alive and well and engaged to be married to Mason. I should say Agent Dipper," he replied, smiling. "She is—I believe the preferred phrase is 'a flippin' Corduroy.' Which means she is . . . extraordinary. However, in a physical sense, she was not ever there."

"I don't understand."

"Take my word for it for the time being. Now, you're not to blame, because you didn't know the nature of the threat. Nor did I, fully. Ignorance is no sin, Agent Hazard, but it should be remedied by knowledge as soon as possible. So for now, I will ask you to revise your Situation Report. Don't parcel out blame—there's none to distribute. Just report what occurred and what you did in response. In my judgment, you acted as an Agent should. True, you bugged my great-nephew's room and eavesdropped on a private conversation, but I didn't forbid that, did I?"

"No, sir."

"And for a long time, it has been standard operating procedure in the Agency to do such things routinely."

"Yes, sir. It's—I beg your pardon, sir, but it's the way I was trained."

Ford nodded and smiled. "Exactly. Do you think we might need to take a look at that kind of training, Agent Hazard?"

She took a deep breath. "I do, sir."

"Fine. You and I are in agreement. Take the rest of the day to revise that Situation Report and get it back to me before I have to leave for Oregon tomorrow morning."

"Yes, sir."

"And before you leave, there's one more matter, Field Specialist Hazard."

"Sir, I'm only a Field Agent First Class—"

"Not as of today. You'll work out of the Sacramento office here, reporting to Deputy Director Powers as of December first. The usual transfer allowance, and if you wish, the Agency will help you find housing."

She blinked at him, looking baffled. "A—promotion?"

"Yes, Hazard. A promotion." He stood up, and she did, too.

He held out his hand. "Congratulations. And informally, thank you for watching over Dipper. That means a lot to me."

She shook his hand—it felt odd, because it was so large—and she blurted, "He's really a good kid, sir."

"Better than I ever was at his age," he agreed softly.

* * *

But before all that, in fact back on October 3, 2016, the Monday morning following the events in Winnemunka, Dipper arrived at the Oakland airport on a flight from Gravity Falls, and Mabel picked him up. "So how was it?" she asked him as he packed his bag—which Hazard had arranged to have waiting for him in the airport—in the trunk of Helen Wheels.

"Harrowing," he told her, slamming the lid. He got in, she backed out of the parking slot, and they left the airport, heading for home.

"The interview go OK?" she asked. "About the scholarship?"

"I . . . turned it down," he said. "The one I have and my savings are enough. Let somebody else who needs it and deserves it have that one."

"Typical Dippingsauce," she said. "You shaved."

"Yes, I decided to clean up."

"Aw. Too bad. The girls at school would've died."

"Hey, I'm not a murderer," he said. They were on the freeway now.

She glanced at him over in the passenger seat and grinned. "I bet you stayed over a day extra just to spend some time with Wendy!"

That made him smile. "Well—yeah. I did. That part was really good."

"Did you make any progress?" she asked. "Lay down some mileage on the ol' Passion Parkway, if you know what I mean? Wink, wink!"

He thought for a second. "Maybe we did. She told me," he said, "that someday—not in the next nine months I mean, but someday—we're going to have a pair of twins."

"Get out of town!" Mabel yelped.

"Stay in your lane," he told her.

* * *

The End


End file.
